Stopmotion

I have a romance with stop motion that I think I need to consummate.  By doing it. Um, learning to do it I should say. Who's got some good resources for me?
Here's an exercise I did just to check things out.  Shot on a Canon 20D, edited in FCP6.



Seems the big thing for me to figure out is armatures to make characters hold still in the postures you set. The creepy rabbitoid had no armature at all. Good for certain things...

Lit, of course, with 2 LED units wearing Airbox Inflatable softboxes.

Airbox LED softboxes on: Mirrorless better than DSLR for video?

Is mirrorless the new deal for DSLRs and lower-budget smaller-scale video shooting?  Or I guess I should say "DSLM".  That's the new term I heard at the WPPI trade show in Las Vegas last week. It was most often mentioned cheek-to-jowl with the term "hybrid" photography, which was also new to me. Mirrorless and hybrid are a trend, which you can see with the field dominating Canon releasing its EOS-M to jump into the fray.

Will Crockett feels strongly this way.  his aurdience is primarily photographers who are transitioning over towards video, since their clients are asking them to.  Some of mine are asking me the reverse:
"did you shoot any stills when you were shooting that part?" And my answer's always, uh, no, because I was shooting video. I didn't shoot any stills.  Maybe that's a lack of planning on my part, that maybe I SHOULD shoot stills along the way when I'm shooting video. So shooting "hybrid" is apparently more and more of the new deal for all of us.

I pressed him on a few of the points in his video.
1.Why's he think it's so much easier to shoot video with mirrorless like a gh2 or gh3 than with the old favorite the 5d?
response:  a) autofocus actually works on mirrorless cameras for video, but autofocus in unavailable in video to DSLRs other than the Sony a99.  b)mirrorless is natively 16:9, making post a little easier. c)more video options like 720 or interlaced available in mirrorless and Sony alphas  d)better overall low light performance in mirrorless.  Performance in his words being a combination of being able to autofocus, judge AWB, and produce good image quality above ISO 2000.



2. Autofocus for video:  I said I still find the autofocus on my GH2 not sufficiently reliable for video work. Sometimes it can follow a moving subject, sometimes it just completely blows it and makes the background really sharp.
Response: Agreed, but still better than you can't ever use it at all.

3.Lots of lenses available:  My impression is yes, you can use lots of lenses on a micro 4/3 mount, technically the most of any format, but in reality, a lot comes down to the quality of the adapters, and a lot of the affordable ones are crap. The lack of iris control on my Canon EF mount lenses when on a m43 mount, not to mention the sloppy wobbly connection between the lens and the camera, makes those lenses basically unusable on m43. There is that cool 550$ smart adapter from redrock micro, but that's pretty spendy. Not to mention the 2x crop factor of the M43 sensor, where your nice wide 24mm EF mount is all of a sudden basically a normal perspective lens.
Response: agreed.  He tries to avoid using adapters except for his Leica glass. Using native lenses is far preferable in most cases.

One thing that can be handy about mirrorless is they're much smaller and usually less expensive for both bodies and glass than pro DSLRs.  Now that Lumix has put out a series of top-quality lenses for M43 format, it feels like a real alternative. When I first got my GH2, there was no fast "normal" zoom available, the equivalent of the Canon L 24-70 2.8. It caused me some heartburn.  Thankfully, now there are the Lumix G X series lenses, which are awesome.  And small! And not that pricey! Only about 1200$ each.

Small camera? Small can be very good sometimes.
When you're just using it as a SLR-style camera, or traveling, that's cool.  I find once I kit it out with all my crap for video, like my d-focus cage, rods, monitor, full-size tripod, and mini slider, it's far from small. Sure is nice to rig up on something.

Here's when little is a big advantage. Check this out:

I don't think you could do that with a chunky SLR with a big lens on it.  well, maybe, but it wouldn't be as fast and it would be harder to do and bounce around more and maybe not work.



Conclusion:
While it's not the only way to shoot video, and all of our favorite DSLRs are still leading the field, I think the day isn't that far away when it will just seem like the more logical choice to shoot video with sleek little DSLMs packed with pro video features than with "big" DSLRs. They're just more video-friendly.  I'm not going to get into the partisan fight about which camera looks better, but there are a lot of just plain practical concerns that make mirrorless attractive. HD live feed to your monitor, for one, so you can keep stuff in focus once you start rolling.

When you're shooting small like this, you'll want your lighting kit to be pretty compact too. What better way than totally collapsible almost weightless softboxes for your LED panels? Check us out.
yours
Tom Guiney
Airboxlights.com
Inflatable softboxes for LED Panels

Airbox photo contest

Hi all.

Hey happy Airboxlights customers-  we need your photos.  Your photos that show you lighting with Airboxes, ideally also showing someone or something in front of the light looking dapper.  I'll send you an Airbox kit, your choice of size, to the person who sends me the best on-set shot. Promise.

yours
Tom Guiney
Airboxlights.com
convictionfilms.net

Carbon footprint comparison: CFL vs. Incandescent

Ever wondered what teh real eco-benefit is to using CFLs instead of incandescents, which are now being phased out completely for household applications?  Here's my analysis. Feedback welcome. Also, if anyone want to work with me on producing a series of shorts along the lines of  this paper, get in touch! There's a lot of magical thinking around people's "green" behavior.  I'd love to dig into some of these areas a little and demystify things. 

_____________________________________________________________________

To compare the now-familiar compact fluorescent bulb to the traditional incandescent bulb, it is important to look at more than just the obvious and much touted difference in energy consumption between the two, which is a well-established difference. Worth examining are not just the amount of electricity used and the amount of lumens emitted per watt used, but also the money spent by the end-user over the life of the bulb, what is necessary to make each of the two different types of bulb, where that occurs, how they all get here, and what happens to them after they’re no longer serviceable.

Here are the two bulbs in question: a Sylvania #12750, 100 Watt, 120 volt frosted bulb, 1710 lumens, 750 hour estimated lifespan, priced at $0.65, and a

CFL Philips lighting #137158, 27 watts, 1750 lumens, 10000-hour lifespan priced at $2.90. 

            The incandescent gives us 17.1 lumens per watt versus the fluorescent’s 64.81 lumens per watt, a clear advantage in energy spent for light gained.  This is not news.

            Also not news is that the incandescent has far superior color rendering.  Incandescent light are what is termed a “black-body lamp”, so called because the light is generated by heating matter, the “black body” in question, up to the temperature at which it glows. Another familiar black body is the sun.  These black body sources distribute light on a smooth curve across the visible spectrum of radiation.  The Color Rendering index uses the light from this other blackbody, the sun, as the source as the benchmark for what constitutes perfect color rendering.  Fluorescents emit light with an uneven distribution across the visible spectrum with spikes in certain frequencies, which we humans find unnatural and unpleasant.

            Assessing the costs over ten thousand hours, the estimated lifespan of the longer-lived bulb, gives us the following results.  Assuming a price of 10.9 cents per kWh, which is what I paid in October 2010, and that the replacement price for the incandescent stays the same as the initial purchase price, .65, it works out to a financial savings of 105$ over the 10,000 hour time span. The CFL uses 27w, working out to 270 kWh over its life, whereas the incandescent uses 1000 kWh over the 10,000 hour time span and needs to be replaced 13.33 times. This replacement factor comes up in every area of examination, that however small the difference between the two bulbs might seem initially, it becomes much greater when multiplied by 13.33.

            As far as the production of the two bulbs is concerned, there are several elements to examine. The first is where are they made and what does it take to get them to the end-user in Brooklyn. Both Philips and Sylvania make most of their bulbs in China, not surprisingly, so one could consider that factor to be equal between the two bulbs.  It might even seem to be an advantage for the incandescent bulb, since by the case, a 100w bulb weighs .096 lb. including packaging, while a 27w cfl weighs .225  lb. including packaging,  only 42% as much.  However, once you include the number of times the incandescent will be replaced, the numbers look much different.  We have 1.28 pounds of incandescent transported from China versus .225 pounds of compact fluorescent, 569% more.

            The next question is what does it take to make each of these bulbs. An incandescent is a glass capsule, a tungsten filament, two nickel-iron lead wires, and a glass-and-aluminum base.            A compact fluorescent is a glass tube, a phosphor coating, some mercury vapor, a filament, circuit-board ballast, and a plastic and aluminum base.

            The process for making an incandescent bulb is as follows: the filament is made by drawing heated tungsten wire through a die, after which it is annealed with heat and wound into its characteristic spiral and treated with acid to remove the mechanism used to make the spiral. The lead-in wires are inserted. The glass casings are made by running a ribbon of heated glass along a conveyor belt, where air nozzles blow the glass into molds that give them their shape. The base is stamped in a mold, the whole thing is put together in a machine, after which it is filled with argon and nitrogen and sealed shut mechanically. Not nothing, but it doesn’t involve as many steps or as much energy as the process for making a compact fluorescent bulb.

            The process to make a CFL is this: The glass is blown into long tubes, which are then cut to length and twisted into a spiral while still heated. The inside of the tube is rinsed with titanium dioxide, pretreated with another chemical, then coated with phosphors on the inside and baked.  The filament is assembled by a machine, then coated with electromagnetic powder, and inserted into the glass tube. The tube is then passed through a torch-like machine to remove impurities and the inside is rinsed with argon. Then the mercury is vaporized and injected into the tube. The circuit board ballast is printed, and then glass, filament and circuit board are glued into a plastic and aluminum base.

            The manufacture of both bulbs is a complex industrial process, but from the preceding paragraphs, it is clear that CFL manufacture has more steps and more heat-based processes, not to mention a higher end-user price, showing us that CFL manufacture is more energy- and material- intensive than incandescent manufacture.

            The incandescent uses about a third less glass than a CFL, about 9 in²  versus about 25 in², since the simple bulb has much less surface area than the long corkscrew shape, and they both use roughly the same amount of aluminum in the screw base, but the incandescent loses out even in these areas because of the one-thirteenth length lifespan.  119 in² used for the incandescents, 25 in² for the CFLs.

            In the area of side effects of manufacturing, the incandescent rises slightly in comparison.  There is nothing particularly toxic in incandescent bulb manufacture, other than the processes necessary to get the raw materials of aluminum, glass, nickel, iron, tungsten, argon and nitrogen, many of which materials are also used in the CFL.  The process of manufacturing CFLs is certainly more of an environmental concern based on the following data.

Not all CFL bulbs comply with the E.U. Restriction of Hazardous Substances of 2006 standard for manufacture of electronics, which bans the use of lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls, and polybrominated biphenyl ether.  Therefore, some of them are still made using these extremely toxic and long-lasting chemicals. Another piece of evidence, albeit circumstantial, is that compact fluorescents are almost entirely manufactured in developing nations with lax environmental regulations, such as China and India. One reason they are cheaper to make them there is the lack of environmental laws.  So as far as toxicity of manufacturing process is concerned, the incandescent is the clear winner.

            Toxicity brings us to the topic of mercury, which is the one negative issue people may have heard raised in connection with compact fluorescents. Mercury is a high-profile toxin. Many U.S. states have a fish consumption advisory due to the presence of mercury in fish. Mercury is highly toxic to the central nervous system and the kidneys and it is estimated that up to 10% of all children born in this

country are at risking of having impaired neurological development due to

mercury. It is no longer mined in most industrialized countries because it is too locally toxic, too expensive on account of environmental protection laws, politically unpopular, or all of the above.  Currently, the main producers of mercury are China, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, and Algeria, none of whom is noted for having strong environmental protection laws.  Spain, formerly a major producer, has recently discontinued mercury mining.

5 mg of mercury per bulb is the current DOE Energy Star rating guideline for mercury content of compact fluorescent bulbs, but that is only for bulbs compliant with that standard, and some other CFLs claim to have significantly less than 5 mg mercury in them.  The bulb we are using as our example is Energy Star compliant, so we will assume that it contains 5 mg of mercury.  At this point, it looks like the incandescent is clearly ahead of the CFL because no mercury is involved at all in its manufacture versus 5 mg for the CFL.

Important to take into account here is that mining for industrial use is not the only source of environmental mercury. Emissions from coal-fired power plants are a major source, approximately .0234 mg of mercury per kWh of electricity generated. America gets approximately 45% of its electricity from burning coal, so if we take 45% of the 1000 kWh to be used by the incandescent, we get 23.4 mg of mercury lofted into the atmosphere by our incandescent.  For the CFL, the number is 6.318 mg of mercury released by the electricity consumption and 5 mg contained in the bulb, totaling 11.318 mg of mercury.  Again, the CFL is ahead, even on mercury.

There is the question of how much the CFL is ahead on mercury, because we don’t know if the 5 mg inside the bulb will be released into the environment or recycled.  When compact fluorescents are thrown away with regular garbage, they are generally tossed in a landfill, where they break, or are incinerated, where they also break.  Obviously when they are incinerated, their mercury enters the atmosphere, but when they are landfilled, some of the mercury still leaches out horizontally in gaseous form.  Let us consider landfills to be part of our environment in the long term, and say that when mercury is thrown in a landfill, that mercury can be considered to be in the environment.

Three studies done in Maine brought back CFL recycling rates of 2%, 6.7%, and 23.5%.  Until better data becomes available, we’ll use the average of those three results, about 10%.  Subtracting 10% from the 5 mg contained in the CFL bulb, we have a final mercury scoring of 10.818 mg mercury for the CFL and 23.4 mg of mercury for the incandescent, (provided that the end user is not one of those people who pays the extra money to get all of their electricity from renewable sources) still a clear advantage to the compact fluorescent.

Beyond mercury, we have to consider mass entering the landfill, which is similar to the earlier transportation topic.  After the mercury from a CFL is reclaimed, the rest of it goes into a landfill, as does a traditional incandescent bulb at the end of its life.  Per ten thousand hours of illumination, we now have .225 pounds of compact fluorescent going into a landfill or incinerator, less a negligible amount for the 5 mg mercury removed, versus 1.28 pounds of incandescent. 

To summarize, here are the differences between the two bulbs. Incandescents look nicer and are cheaper and less toxic to make, but not when you consider that you need thirteen times more of them.  Compact fluorescents have a more complex, toxic and energy-intensive manufacture process, and do contain mercury that could end up in the end-user’s immediate environment, but because they last so much longer than incandescents, they come out ahead on all counts.  When that lifespan multiplier, a factor of more than thirteen, is taken into account, they cost the user less in the long run, they give more light for the amount of energy used, they use less resources in their manufacture and transport, and they take up less space in landfills or capacity in incinerators.

The concerns with compact fluorescents that must be kept in mind are ones of toxicity.  One should make sure to buy compliant CFLs (the TCP brand is an example), and be sure to recycle bulbs that no longer work to avoid depositing that mercury in one’s own immediate environment.  Energy Star’s savings calculation spreadsheet also has some nice green bromides further encouraging you to use them.  They state that replacing one 100w incandescent with a 27w CFL is the equivalent of taking one tenth of one car off the road for a year, has the equivalent air pollution reduction of 1/8 of an acre of forest, and will save putting 1150 lbs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

yours

Airboxlights.com inflatable softboxes for LED lights; 1x1 model coming soon!

Convictionfilms.net - shooting, lighting, producing in the South Bay Area

Micro Grip and Lighting Kit

Sometimes I get this notion like I've got all the answers on something, an of course that means I don't. I got my eyes opened a bit on how small you can go with gear and still be very effecive. This is particularly relevant when you're working by yourself or with a very small crew. I gaffed a Chrome spot for a dp named Norman Bonney, and he had a whole kit of totally miniaturized gear, optimized for fitting in one vehicle and for taking on airplanes.
Kit was
1 case: 4 LEDs, 2 1x1 panels and two 6" x1' panels
4 skinny little 18/3 "stingers"
A bag of slender aluminum stands, of a degree of sturdiness that I had previously dismissed as Mickey-mouse student film stuff. Some stands were 3/8" studs at the top, some were standard 5/8" studs.
Portable fold-up flag kit
Collapsible 4x6 westcott scrimjim frames and a duffel bag full of soft goods.
Instead of heavy duveteen, he carried lightweight ripstop nylon
And the grip kit: instead of heavy steel 2 1/2" steel gobo heads, these tiny little 1 1/2" grip heads. So this is what your "C-stand" looks like:

A tiny stand, a tiny head, and a tiny cardi. Slender, but big enough to handle this lightweight collapsible 4x frame on an interior set:

And all the bags and cases were 49 lbs or less and less than 62" long, making it all air-travel ready.

I dig it!  I shoot a bunch of little jobs where it's basically just me, and if everything fit in bags and cases and didn't weight all that much, that would be just fine with me.

Handy items in my kit as far as extreme portability are the inflatable softboxes I make to go with my LED lights.  They just squish down on top of the lights in the case and add barely any weight or bulk since they're inflatable. Also handy are these cheesy "Impact" brand light stands that I got a while ago and then regretted because they seemed so flimsy.  They've proved really reliable, even if they are lightweight. They work.  When I'm not bringing "any" lights, I bring my two 1x1 panels in their laptop bags and these two lightweight stands and my little briefcase of small LED units and Airbox softboxes.  

Trivium: "Impact" is one of B&H's house brands of gear, along with Pearstone and probably a few others.

Eggcrates; light control devices

Last post, one of the cool products I was talking about was a new soft eggcrate with a convenient design improvement, but I didn't spend any time on eggcrates in general.  Everyone does know how handy grids are and how they work, right?

Easiest way to explain them is by looking at one.

Here's an image showing a soft source with an eggcrate from straight on:

You see the whole source, pretty much.  Now take a look from an angle.

You see a whole lot less of it. Ergo, if you're not straight out in front of it, a lot less light will be hitting you.












Here are a couple drawings I did to explain the concept to the Patent Office. (Finally got the paperwork!  An approved patent from the USPTO! It's been several years of work, and now I have... a piece of paper. A Very Official Piece of Paper.)

You can see in figure 7 that much of the light which scatters up and down off the surface of the front diffusion panel is blocked by the slats of the eggcrate; only those beams of light which are going roughly forward are permitted to pass.

You can buy this stuff in 24"x40" sheets if you need it for a custom light you're building like a chicken coop or something like that. If you're in New York, Canal Plastics sells it. (Off topic, but they also do CNC laser cutting of acrylic sheets!  Give them an Illustrator or other vector file, and they'll laser that out of a sheet of acrylic for you.  I made a bunch of custom stencils like that one time. Anyway.)

On Real World 10 in New York, we built piles of custom softboxes and we handmade eggcrates out of lauan for all of them!!  That was a labor of stupidity.  But, to be fair to us, that was before the internet was the INTERNET, where anyone can find anything anywhere in a matter of minutes.  It was 1999-2000.  So since we didn't know where to get the stuff, we made it.  Young and energetic and determined. And underpaid.  It was a great-looking season though. Towards the end of the build I think I just slept in one of the cast bedrooms instead og going home.  20-hour days dont lend themselves to getting much sleep.

Honeycombs work the same way, but they're much more durable than plastic eggcrates or "louvers" as they are called by most manufacturers. Honeycomb is also made of thinner material, and can be manufactured in smaller cells, making for a tighter beam control pattern.

Honeycomb is also quite expensive. Each eggcrate I bought for my old Parabeams, approximately 28"x28", was about 250$.  Pricey.

I've seen a couple very clever ultralight honeycomb style devices at some trade shows. One was made by Gekko, the LED company, as an accessory to their Kelvin Tile.  I wish I had a photo.  It was a honeycomb, but it looked like it was just an array of little 1/2" long plastic drinking straws standing on their ends held together in a frame. It was as effective as an aluminum honeycomb but was much lighter weight and ought to be cheaper.  Kino flo is making plastic honeycombs now for their new Tegra kinos. Theirs is plastic.  I wish I knew where to get sheets of lightweight plastic honeycomb that I could cut into appropriate sizes for my Airboxes.

DTC; Arri Locaster; Cardellini; Rag Place

DTC Grip and Lighting, the biggest rental house in the Bay Area, had a small gear expo recently. It was a dual-networking opportuniyt for me, both for Airbox Lights and also for my other DP/lighting/producer identity as Conviction Films. Most of the gear was grip and electric stuff, not much in the way of camera etc.

For me it was a pretty successful event.  I don't know many folks around here since I transplanted from New York, so any connections are good connections at this point.

Highlights:

•the Airbox Macro fits on the Arri Locaster LED light!  It's Arri.  It's top end.  Top end jobs use them. And probably lots of them, the way big union shoots tend to order gear. This could be good for us! My flexible strap design pays off again. Thanks to Mitch Gross for the original nudge to come up with a one-size-fits-all design.

•I met Steve Cardellini, the inventor of the ubiquitous and ever-useful cardellini clamp.  Nice guy.  He quit Key Gripping four years ago to just sell Cardellini products. I'd always wondered if there was a saturation point at which the market wouldn't require any more cardellinis, since the'yre pretty durable and don't really wear out.  He said he had always thought so too, but that he was still selling more and more of them every year!  It's good to be Steve Cardellini it seems.

•the Rag Place:  Some really great products. Spendy perhaps, but they're better than the average grip fabrics.
Things I liked: a single-ply double net.  It works on-camera without any moire!  And it's quite sturdy. Here's some video showing what it looks like when you shoot through it.



No-moire single-ply double net! from Thomas Guiney on Vimeo.

They also make this neat snap-open eggcrate.

We all love eggcrates, except they're a little inconvenient and fragile.  This is something I would buy.  Imagine- you can get a 4x4 source, but not necessarily have to set two more 4x4 siders on it just to keep it from going everywhere.  For the small-production owner-operator, the speed and convenience of this could be great, even if it's a bit pricey for that scale of production.