Recent content by SDBenassi

What digital camera should I shoot my black and white feature on?

I have all these short films that I no longer have the original files for, just the burned DVD for playback. As far as archiving goes.. did I screw up? I want to jump into making a feature but I have this CRAZY fear that it will all be for nothing and years down the line only a degraded copy...

Is it still possible to shoot a feature on black and white film?

I wanted to shoot natural lighting, cloud cover, almost like walking through the fog. Was aiming at shooting the Santa Cruz mountains actually, but most of the time it is bright with blue skies and harsh lighting, very opposite the look I'm going for.

I am shooting a movie this june and am wondering how I can acheive the look of december? The story takes place in a smaller, mountain-type of town. I am mostly concerned with the lighting being too bright or too harsh, as when I think of winter in the mountains I see softer lighting, maybe...

I have a story that takes place in a single-story elderly lady's house (and mostly the living room). In the final scene we learn that the main character is insane and that in fact he has been in a dingy apartment the entire time. His mind has been hallucinating that the dingy apartment was a...

I just shot a project on P2 cards on the Panasonic HVX200 and now when I'm trying to download my files into Final Cut 6.0 via Log and Transfer it goes idle. I can play the clip in the viewer, but it won't download, the wheel turns for a second and an orange exclamation mark pops up. I've tried...

I'm trying to find a prop for a checkbook, but oddly enough, no prop stores in the LA area that I've tried seem to have one. In my short film, the character flips through the checkbook looking for something, so you actually see all of the checks, register, deposit slips, etc. I don't want to...

Recording a dialogue, indoors in a house, between two characters having a direct conversation with one another. Small sound budget but want it to sound good. What equipment should I use? Want to connect it to my Panasonic HVX 200 wich I am shooting with.. lavs.. boom? Advice appreciated!

I'm about to shoot a short that entirely takes place in a home office during the day/ dusk. The idea of the film is to show no faces, just hands doing work at the desk and an occasional shot of shoes/ high heels of the character who is at the desk. Except for a couple rare tracking shots into...

So, for reasons pertaining to the difficulties of pre-production and budget restraints, I have a much easier time getting a 35mm lens adapter for a standard def Canon XL-2 than a Hi-Def Panasonic HVX200. This is for a short, 5 minute film, which I will be submitting to film festivals, but which...

Hi, I just finished my first short film shot on HD and I'm trying to figure out the best way to output it in an HD format. Being that I'm festivaling it, I would like to find something I could affordably make several copies of (my budgets not big, in the hundreds of dollars range). I looked...

Okay, figured out some important stuff. So when I play the DVD on my HDTV or my friends flat screen TV, it plays mono, and one of the stereo tracks is completely left out. But when I play a regular, store-bought DVD on those same TVs, it plays in stereo. So it's my DVD that is the problem...

sorry, left out some important info: The dvd plays fine on my computer, an IMac, where both mono and stereo tracks are clearily audible. But when I played it on my HD TV or my friend's 4x3 flat screen TV (both with somewhat older DVD players), some of the mono tracks didn't seem to play at...

So I just finished editing my first short film and when I finally burned it to DVD, many of the audio tracks were muffled. I was told this was because some of my audio tracks were mono and that to fix this I needed to copy every mono track and paste it with the 'pan' dragged over to the other...