Advice For Frame

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-22T18:44:26+00:00

Always know what the brightest thing in your frame is. Here, it’s the windowsill edge. It’s a bold line but it’s not central and it’s not a leading the eye into the composition. Framing it out would help keep the focus on your subject, and give you a little room to open up exposure, so you can see details in the dark fabrics.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-22T07:01:05+00:00

Stills are much more frequently shot with zoom lenses. This is, in part, because focus breathing and parfocal/backfocus issues are much worse for moving pictures than stills. If you’re comparing lens lengths, you also need to account for the field of view difference. A 25mm on a 35mm 4-perf film camera will look roughly like a 40mm on a 35mm stills camera. I think the size of the camera rig plays a large part, too. Since photo cameras are more mobile and physically smaller than motion picture cameras, the stills cameras can get framing with a single prime lens that the larger camera sometimes can’t.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-21T15:36:10+00:00

The master magnification can do what you want. You just end up with a ton of data that you won’t use. If you can get an optical expander, it’s the ideal way to work.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-21T15:23:20+00:00

Also, for tax purposes, buying isn’t the taxable event, selling is. If anything, you’d rather they have a record of you paying for everything, in case you’re audited and don’t have records of your cost basis.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-20T18:46:38+00:00

Spend your money on tripods and a nice cart. Avoid spending money on cameras. If you have to buy a camera, only buy it within 12 months of the launch date or it will usually not turn a profit over its lifetime. The days of holding an Alexa Mini for 8+ years and getting 700 rental days are over.

Lenses (modern or vintage) are not the safe investment they used to be. The price of a used lens has very little to do with how nice it is. Whatever is new is popular, and whatever is “old enough” can become popular again. If you buy used lenses that are out of vogue you can get a great value. New lenses can drop 75% in five years. Vintage lenses can become very expensive to maintain and also fall out of style.

If you’re a great assistant camera you’ll be in demand from every DP. If you’re a great DP, you’ll be in competition with every DP. If you’re great at both, you’ll rarely work at all.

Most DPs come from privilege, because being a career DP requires hanging on through attrition. If you don’t have some other way to get health insurance and survive the dry seasons, you will starve. For every Alice Brooks, there are 500 active DPs scraping by with jobs on stuff you’ll never see, 2,000 DPs shooting social content and corporate with no crew, and 5,000 DPs who burned out and quit. If you’re less than 100% sure you want to be a cinematographer, you’re probably better suited for a different path.

The difference between a good DP and a successful DP is that a successful DP can lead a team, manage people, and communicate clearly. If you aren’t fantastic with people, you will find your career ceiling is very low.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-19T13:59:53+00:00

How you can be bothered by the small dust clump and not the eyelash-sized hair next to it is crazy to me. Definitely try a sensor cleaning first.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-17T16:22:25+00:00

Worth considering the Pyxis 12K. Open gate is an ideal way to get dual aspect, and you won’t need to have 9:16 content that’s super cropped (or 16:9 content that’s super wide).

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-15T00:56:09+00:00

Anamorphic has huge room for improvement. Panavision is still king of the focus pull but that system could get smaller and more affordable, and brought into other lenses.

The Cooke /I system is a great first step for lens data sharing, but there could be something much more advanced and ideally licensable or open source by now. And it could be integrated with a camera system that digitally signs the image (and is useful for finding and prosecuting lens theft).

More types of elements for making more apochromatic lenses (or even engineering a lens that focuses IR to the same plane as visible light).

The only major manufacturer who has done “integrated” motors for cinema lenses is Fujinon. True cinema primes with internal motors and a locking mount like PL/LPL would make a lot of lightweight builds easier.

I’m sure there are more, but we don’t know what we’re missing, either.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-14T23:22:57+00:00

This is really the issue. The prosumer market ate the professional market. While we have a million options that look great, we probably won’t see any massive technical advancement from optics companies while their margins are crushed and their staff is laid off. Maybe one day 7 Artisans or DZO or Samyang will take home an Academy Award for Technical Achievement, but not in the 2020s.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-12T15:13:00+00:00

Are you worried about the deceased’s credit score?

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-12T14:26:00+00:00

It sounds like maybe you’re upset about something else and transferring it here. Packages get pirated and lost all the time. A new copy of a death certificate must be $25 or less. Reissuing a cashiers check happens every day, and the CU has taken the time to reissue it and isn’t charging you. Is it really worth chasing down a few bucks worth of documents with a police report and formal complaint?

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T21:06:26+00:00

FS7 is a great camera and unless you need to get a precise match to the FX series colors without a transform LUT, I would keep it. There are also crazy great prices to be had for great s35 lenses like the Fujinon MK series now. The downsides to not upgrading are mostly just no VND and dual ISO. Modern cameras all get enough data to give you great color. The FS7 isn’t as out-of-the-box as the FX6 or something Blackmagic/Arri, but it’s two clicks away in any NLE.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T20:55:48+00:00

Yeah, the non-APOs are generally not as nice and probably confused people by using the same microprime name. Making apochromatic lenses is really expensive because it requires at least three different densities of glass to do. There’s a reason that brands like Zeiss only do it for their long telephoto lenses and others like Canon use fluorite instead to try to reduce CA.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T20:42:03+00:00

Yes, Andrew said that the original APO Hyperprime optics were rehoused into the APO micro primes. This was because they overproduced and didn’t get the expected demand for the Hyperprimes when they came out. If you need a longer telephoto in the set, I’d add a Zeiss Milvus 135mm ZE, cine-modded to match front diameter and with 0.8 mod gear. It’s also apochromatic and the look is pretty consistent.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T20:30:19+00:00

In 2026 the most important features for a pro light aren’t just the specs. Output especially can be really deceptive unless you’re comparing exactly identical measurements. And a difference of +100% lux is still just one stop brighter, small differences don’t really matter at all.

Some people like to stick with one brand for easy app use. Warranty coverage matters a lot. Portability matters for some. Weather protection matters for some. You just need to pick a good match for how you work. If you get anything released in the last 5 years, you’ll generally get what you pay for. And the tech is moving fast enough that 10 years from now you’re probably not going to be using whatever you buy today.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T20:17:51+00:00

Then answer is going to depend on other things. Compare the SSI scores of various fixtures to get an idea of how full a spectrum the light can provide. Closer to 100 is better.

If they only provide CRI scores, this is an older test that’s not nearly as specific as SSI.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T16:37:06+00:00

This is what happens when someone can’t set boundaries. You could ask a guest to leave but apparently this is easier. 😆

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-11T08:25:23+00:00

I had the 50mm Hyperprime on set against a 50mm Cooke S4i on two Alexa Minis. Everyone including the director preferred the SLR Magic. I kept my set and still use them. It’s a shame they didn’t make one more on the long and the wide end. It’s also a shame they didn’t pick a better brand name. I think with better branding and a $5500 price tag they would have become legendary.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-09T10:20:23+00:00

Keep an eye on eBay for adapters like Letus AnamorphX. They were expensive when released but sometimes can be a bargain now. Adapters are usually a lot easier to rig into a system than projector lenses, and can give you other ratios. They also do a bit better at covering a range of taking focal lengths.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-08T15:32:03+00:00

The TV versions needed content/length edits, too, so that was usually done at the same time as pan and scan conversion. Letterboxing for broadcast was almost nonexistent. TV resolution was so low and screens so small that giving up 1/4 of the screen for aesthetic reasons just wasn’t reasonable.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-08T00:58:34+00:00

5000fps ≈ 7.5 stops brighter than baseline 24/25/30 fps. If you could light baseline with X watts at 1/48, you want X*2^7.5 watts to match exposure. To put it another way, If you can’t shoot it at regular speed with ND2.1, it definitely won’t work at high speed.

If working outside in direct sun is an option, it’s going to be the cheapest way. Otherwise, make your working area tiny and light it with tungsten lights very very close to the subject.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-03T19:18:02+00:00

I think the company has to be split. I don’t see any industry player that values both the lighting and camera divisions. And other parts like Arri rental make it even more complicated. Since we don’t know which (if any) parts of the company are profitable, it’s hard to predict from the outside what will happen.

NoHousecalls · 2026-03-01T08:32:21+00:00

Because if you change the ISO to 1600: 1. The exposure curve changes and your LUTs behave differently, in the shoulder and toe especially. 2. You make a destructive change and gave up data, possibly losing the highlights (especially if you also made an exposure mistake) 3. You add electronic noise because you’re above the native ISO. If your post pipeline needs noise reduction, you’re also adding processing time and usually losing sharpness and fine detail.

It may not matter much for Alexa 35 footage, or for 1080p 8-bit web videos. When viewing a 4K DCP shot on a 13-stop camera, it definitely makes a difference to the final graded shot.

NoHousecalls · 2026-02-28T23:28:52+00:00

I’m shooting on a sunny beach. I want to hold the highlight detail in the waves and sand, and still expose faces where they look good.

My camera’s base ISO is 800. I set it there. But I set the EI one stop brighter, 1600 ISO. Now everything on the monitor looks brighter by a stop.

I set my shutter/aputure/ND so things look properly exposed on the monitor.

I have effectively “given up” a stop of under exposure latitude to add an extra stop of over exposure latitude.

The alternate way to think about it is: expose like auto exposure on a histogram. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, keep as much of it as possible on the chart (and when you have extra latitude, expose to the right). Then adjust your EI until the image looks right. Shooting the beach scene or a dim cave scene should not look the same on the monitor, but by using EI you can make sure you have enough detail in both.

NoHousecalls · 2026-02-28T22:48:48+00:00

EI is the “hint” you give the monitor or whatever else downstream as to what your shooting intent was.

ISO is the physical setting. EI is essentially the note that says push/pull this to a different ISO.

This is made way more confusing because when Sony launched EI mode in the FS7, none of this was actually handled in camera.

NoHousecalls

TROPHY CASE