Red filter

[John Cook]

Mark, thanks for the information. While having worked in a Hollywood crew forty years ago, I am on slightly shaky ground here as my experience was only with tv commercials.

However, I would suspect that all sorts of fancy footwork is done for important film makers these days.

But my impression was that day-for-night was more common in the 30's and 40's flood of weekly B westerns. I wasn’t sure that non-heroic staff directors had that sort of clout to fool with the miles of film that must have been processed every night.

[Mark Woods]

Hi John,

The first generation of DPs did work closely with the lab since meters didn't exist. The original 35mm still camera was "developed" to shoot the scene to be photographed and "slop" processed. The DP would bracket his exposures and pick the neg that he thought was the best. The 35mm still camera and how it's been used since is history. BTW, someone mentioned the cost of processing in the labs, it actually isn't as much as you might think. The prices range from about a low of $.07/foot to a rate card of about $.12/foot. Also, the cost per foot used to be carried to only 4 decimal places, because of competition it generally now is carried out to 6 decimal places. Small budget films shoot around 80,000 feet of film. Large budget films could be anything. Some commercials have shot 1 million feet of film! Brings some life to the room full of monkeys with typewriters eventually writing a Shakespear style sonnet. Most of todays DPs only go to the lab to look at film dailies, and that is almost a thing of the past. I could go on, but this isn't Imax or Omnimax ;-)

Kind Regards,

Mark Woods

Director of Photography

[John_4185]

The first generation of DPs did work closely with the lab since meters didn't exist.

Photoelectric light meters did not exist before 1932 or so, but extinction meters did, and the Sunny Sixteen rule was well known. Was the 'slop' actually due to the imprecise development methods? When film was so precious (much early film making was 70mm) it seems crazy to 'bracket' motion picture scenes. But then, such was the beginning of the whole art and craft, so perhaps the point was not how well the bear danced, but that it danced at all.

[Conrad Hoffman]

I have both a #25 and a #29, and don't find them wildly and hugely different. I'd get the #25, and if you need an even more dramatic effect, combine it with a polarizer! IMO, an orange filter often gives a better rendition with less "damage" to the non-sky parts of the scene. Remember that shadows are illuminated by blue skylight, so the scene contrast will go up dramatically when you use a red filter. Often too much so. Chances are that shadows will be underexposed without careful metering plus intelligent use of the filter factor. Just blindly plugging the filter factor isn't always the route to success.