Toolbox

DP Stephen Hussar is fascinated by restoration projects, both the processes themselves and the motivations of the people who dedicate themselves to reconditioning pieces of the past. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that he has spent years documenting the progress of the restoration efforts on an 1891 steam locomotive housed at the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington (WW&F) Railway Museum in Alna, Maine.

In the mid-2000s, Hussar produced Restoration Stories, a hour-long documentary that has aired more than 700 times by PBS member stations across the country since 2006. He considered it as a sort of pilot for a series he wanted to develop, but never found the time to complete another episode between his still photography business, freelance gigs for PBS and other clients, and ongoing series work.

One of the features in the hour-long program focused on the railway museum, which was making plans to restore the 1891 locomotive during the time of the shoot. The restoration actually began a few years later, and the museum expects the engine to be operational by the end of 2015. Hussar has been collecting footage of the restoration process and plans to produce a one-hour Restoration Stories follow-up for PBS.

When he is not at the museum, Hussar stays busy with his day job, shooting food “beauty shots” and handling master dolly shots for several PBS cooking series. He began shooting cooking shows with Julia Child. Since then, he has worked on 16 seasons of America’s Test Kitchen, 12 seasons of Simply Ming, and eight seasons of Cook’s Country.

For his cooking shows, Hussar usually shoots with a Sony F55 and is very particular with his lighting, although setups tend to be quick so the food can look its best. “There isn’t one thing, it’s a combination of things,” he explained. “The food and the plate have to look nice. I also don’t use a front light – I like to light from the side to give everything dimension.”

Over the course of more than a dozen freelance shoots for a variety of clients, the Zylight F8-100 LED Fresnel has become Hussar’s “favorite lighting instrument of all time.” He plans to use the F8-100 on his various cooking shows when shooting resumes later this year. “I always ask for it because it’s so versatile and it’s so good,” he said.

During recent shoots in the museum’s machine shop, a daylight balanced F8-100 has become Hussar’s main light as well. The facility has warm 150-watt incandescent lighting throughout, along with windows that add sunlight, so Hussar uses the F8-100 to make it appear like the key light is coming from the windows. Previously, he used an F8-100 to create a similar beam of “sunlight” on a library wall filled with law books for a freelance shoot in an old Boston courthouse.

The F8-100 delivers close to the light output of a traditional 1000-watt Fresnel, but only draws 90 watts and can be powered by a standard 14.4V camera battery or AC adapter. While Hussar has used HMIs for years, he appreciates that the F8-100 stays cool – and does not have to warm up to provide the right color temperature. “The light coming out of it is even, controllable, and it’s the right color temperature,” he said. “It’s really well made. It’s a great Fresnel and it happens to be an LED.”

Hussar said using battery power instead of a power cord has been a helpful feature in the museum. “It’s a very visually interesting location with all of the shop machinery being historic and authentic,” he explained. “It’s not like I’m working in a hurry, but it simplifies things. The fewer wires running around heavy machinery the better.”

Available in daylight (5600K) or tungsten (3200K) versions, the F8-100 collapses to less than four inches thick for easy transport. Its patented focusing system allows spot and flood operations, while its eight-inch SCHOTT glass lens maintains single shadow traditional Fresnel beam shaping. Its quantum dot technology provides a more refined and balanced natural light output, delivering a high CRI (Color Rendering Index) and a high TLCI (Television Lighting Consistency Index). Recently, Zylight introduced the F8-200, which has many of the same features of the F8-100 but delivers the brightness of a 2,000-watt tungsten or 400-watt HMI.

Colorfront, the Academy and Emmy Award-winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, high-end episodic TV and commercials, announced that Colorfront Transkoder, its automated, standalone system for high-quality digital file conversion, has been certified by Dolby Laboratories for the creation of Dolby Atmos Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs).

With the expansion of Transkoder’s toolset to include support for Dolby’s object-based audio format, postproduction studios can leverage Transkoder’s extreme performance to create Dolby Atmos DCPs at up to ten-times faster-than-realtime, making Transkoder a reliable, cost-effective and feature-rich alternative to other systems.

Using Dolby Atmos object-based audio, sound experts have the creative freedom to place sound anywhere in the movie theatre--not just where there happen to be speakers--to deliver an immersive listening experience. Sound mixers can tag each sound “object” with precise directions as to where it should appear or move in the room. Dolby Atmos takes into account the unique configuration of each venue, to ensure a consistent, high-quality audio experience regardless of the size and shape. Thanks to an intelligent decoder box, sound objects are rendered and distributed to the required number of speakers.

“Dolby Atmos is a remarkable technology that brings an exciting dynamic to the cinema-going experience,” said Aron Jaszberenyi, managing director of Colorfront. “The official certification of Colorfront Transkoder for Dolby Atmos further expands Transkoder’s comprehensive capabilities, gives DCP mastering facilities new levels of performance and productivity, and establishes Colorfront as the premier provider of mastering solutions for high-end digital cinema.”

Soundfirm, Australia’s largest independent picture and sound post production company, with facilities in Melbourne, on the Fox Studios’ lot in Sydney and in central Beijing, recently purchased Transkoder for digital cinema mastering at its newly constructed Melbourne headquarters. Soundfirm recently completed picture and sound post, including a Dolby Atmos mix, for the feature film The Dressmaker, starring Liam Hemsworth, Kate Winslet, Judy Davis and Hugo Weaving.

Soundfirm CEO Roger Savage said, “In Melbourne we offer Australia’s only Dolby Atmos Mixing and Mastering stage. Now with Colorfront’s Dolby-certified Transkoder in the workflow, we can power our way to final 2K and 4K DCPs, including a full Dolby Atmos sound mix and subtitles. This continues our tradition of working at the vanguard of cinema innovation.”

Transkoder runs on cost-effective Supermicro, HP Z840 and new Mac Pro platforms. It has unique, GPU-accelerated, faster-than-real-time capabilities, and a comprehensive toolset which combine make it the ultimate tool for HFR UHDTV and 4K-6K-8K digital cinema applications.

Along with object-based audio technology support, Transkoder’s features include 240FPS JPEG2000 encode-decode, DCP/DCI-compliant mastering, IMF/IMP authoring, packaging, verification and QC. Harnessing Colorfront Transkoder, Dolby Atmos mixes can be easily integrated into DCI and SMPTE DCP mastering processes, with the DCP created at up to ten times faster than realtime.

Colorfront will demonstrate Transkoder, along with its Express Dailies and On-Set Dailies systems, at SMPTE 2015 in Sydney, Australia from July 14-17.

When veteran sound mixer Irin Strauss was tasked with capturing audio for the indie film Tangerine, he turned to the 664 Production Mixer, made by Sound  Devices, specialists in portable audio and video products for field production.

Tangerine is a comedy-drama from writer-director Sean Baker. Shot entirely with Apple iPhones, the feature is an intimate look at a day in the lives of two transgender prostitutes.

The deployment of two Apple iPhone5 cameras required Strauss to choose highly compact, mobile equipment in order to keep up with the production crew.

“For Tangerine, two cameramen were running around with phones, allowing us to quickly shoot in certain locations, almost undetected,” said Strauss. “As the sound guy and the boom operator, I had the most to carry. Having the mixer and recorder in one machine proved invaluable for this project, as it was one less thing to carry.”

Armed with his Sound Devices 664, purchased from Gotham Sound, Strauss was able to keep up with the two iPhone 5 operators. For the narrative dialogue, he put everything onto one track, with straight ISOs for everybody else, who were wired most of the time.  He would also mix the boom and the wired tracks when necessary. 

“We weren’t really sure how things would pan out, shooting an entire film using just iPhones, and since the pace was so fast, there wasn’t time to create sound reports, so I really had to rely on the  metadata from the 664,” said Strauss. “In addition, using the 664  made  monitoring each individual track very easy and convenient.”

The  smart  phone  camera  setup  also  included  Moondog  Labs’  1.33x  anamorphic  adapter  and the FiLMiC Pro app. In addition to his 664, Strauss used a Lectrosonics SMV wireless system for his transmitters, along with Sanken COS-11D lavaliers. He employed a Schoeps CMIT5U shotgun microphone and, occasionally, a T-powered Schoeps CMC 4U for locations with low ceilings and little head room. 

“This was probably the most challenging project I have ever worked on, as it was not easy to keep up with two guys with iPhones,” said Strauss. “They would just grab their phones and start shooting. Since there weren’t any monitors, I had to make my best guess about what the shots were and how they aligned them. The 664 was  really  an excellent choice for this fast-paced production. It is a great piece of equipment.”

The 664 features six ultra-low noise, high dynamic range transformer-less preamps that accept mic- or line-level signals and include analog peak limiters, high-pass filters, input trim control and direct outputs on every channel. Direct outputs for input channels 1-6 can be switched to six line  inputs (7-12)  for a total of 12  inputs. The 664 records up to 16 tracks of 16- or 24-bit broadcast WAV files to SD and/or CompactFlash cards. All inputs and outputs are individually selectable for recording, enabling the mixer to record up to 12 ISO and four mix tracks. With its dual card slots, the 664 can record WAV or MP3 content to either or both cards simultaneously, with the added ability to assign different tracks to each memory card.

Codex is now delivering the Codex V-RAW Recorder for the Panasonic VariCam 35 camera to customers worldwide. Combining high-performance with ease-of-use, the Codex V-RAW Recorder adds important uncompressed RAW capture to Panasonic’s new camera platform by enabling the recording of 4K RAW at up to 120fps.

The Codex V-RAW Recorder records to the next-generation Codex Capture Drive 2.0, which has a bandwidth of 20Gb/s and has raised the bar for high-end capture. The combination of the V-RAW Recorder and the Capture Drive 2.0 can easily handle the bandwidth required for recording uncompressed 4K RAW at up to 120fps from the Panasonic VariCam 35. For simplicity, the V-RAW Recorder comes as a direct-attach module for the VariCam 35 camera, eliminating the need for cables and making operation straightforward. Adding even more functionality to the camera package, the V-RAW Recorder also powers the camera and has three 24V accessory power outputs.

“We’ve worked with Codex recording and workflow technology for several years and they have great, reliable products backed by excellent support,” said Michael Condon, SOC, VP Digital Division at Clairmont Camera in Los Angeles. “We are excited to get the new Codex V-RAW Recorders into the hands of our rental customers and happy that Panasonic chose Codex as their technology partner for RAW workflows.”

The Codex V-RAW Recorder for the VariCam 35 continues Codex’s tradition of providing not reliable recording and media, but also a fully-featured, streamlined workflow from production to post and archive, via Codex Vault Platform, Vault Review, Review Live and Media Vault systems. Existing Vault customers, such as Atlanta-based cinematographer and rental house owner John Sharaf, appreciate that despite the data requirements of the VariCam 35, Codex products are engineered to meet today’s challenge of faster throughput. Along with Clairmont Camera, Sharaf is one of the first V-RAW Recorder owners in the United States.

“As a Codex Vault owner, I am very familiar with Codex products already,” said Sharaf. “Panasonic couldn’t have chosen a better partner for RAW recording and workflow for the Varicam 35. Codex’s products are cutting-edge and backed-up by world-class customer support.”