Friday, October 06, 2006

Burned out pixels and the end of the world

Got a couple more shoots over and done with. Nothing too major, things went pretty smooth - aside from forgetting a major piece of someone's costume and needing to have it picked up and delivered. Thanks Rick.

One scene we shot may or may not even be used, I won't really decide until the movie is done. But I like how it came out so I probably will find a place for it. It's just a little scene involving The Resurrectionist killing someone, but it's set up like a scene from Exorcist 3. And the other scene is the last of the flashback sequences with the character Grayson (Derek Martin) who now gets to age 26 years in about a month before we shoot the rest of his stuff.

(What follows is more or less me bitching about technical problems. If bitching about technical problems interests you, please read on, otherwise skip down a bit.)

So now the fun part...In the middle of shooting the scene with Derek and Kim (Bradford) an annoying little glowing green spot appears oin the LCD screen. I stop shooting, I check the footage, the spot is there too now. So I have another burned out pixel, I had one before, it was so faint it wasn't noticable unless the scene was pitch back, and even then it was no big since it was near the upper left corner. This one was damned near in the middle of the screen and glowed like some radioactive zit.
So I keep shooting, I can clean it up - frame by freaking frame, but I can clean it up. I tried to frame the shots as much as possible to avoid too much movement in that area...Again, in the damned near in the middle of the screen - kinda hard to avoid.

Afterwards I went online to see if other folks had this issuse. Seems like it, but I didn't see too many posts in any forums or whatnot right away. And of course, if any of you are famliar with Canon's (my camera's a 6 year old Canon GL1) policy of repairing equipment, they won't even give an estimate unless you send them your camera - and even then, you have to hope the post office doesn't damage it more. And then once Canon has your camera, and they look at it (and I have no idea how long that takes) and finally decides to tell you how much it costs, you probably can't afford it. And then you have to hope, if you can't afford it, that Canon will promptly and safely return it in the condition it was when you sent it. From what I've read - no guarantee on that happening.

If right now you thinking "Hey, you sound kinda cranky." You're right...mind you if you know me, I usually sound like that even when I'm in a good mood, the only way to tell the difference is maybe by facial expression - even then, who knows.

But, it's actually not the end of the world, at least not completely. More like we kinda lost a good chunk of it. I found a workaround. After looking at one post online about burned out pixels, someone mention adjusting some of the brightness settings (well, he actually said the F stop, that did nothing) and it worked. I just have to overlight some of my shots a bit and maybe do a little colour correcting in post (which I was going to do anyway).

In the end, I guess it's better then nothing.

(End of bitching, thank you for reading or not reading. We now return to something slightly different.)

So another little chunk of the movie taken care of. The flashback scene with Derek and Kim was just a large narrative part, explaining a bit of the background and begins to explain the plot. While the footage looks good and all, the whole while of shooting I'm thinking of doing something extra funky with it - it needs it. It's just dialog, not the most exciting thing in the world. I'll probably add some weird audio once we get that far, but now I'm thinking just adjusting the background, have weird little things floating in the air...I have no idea, I'm thinking out loud. Or thinking in type. Whatever.

I have stills and some behind the scenes photos to go through, I'll pick out some shots and post them in the morning. Have a good night folks.

No comments:

Post a Comment