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Chad Peter

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About Chad Peter

  • Birthday 03/29/1980

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  • Location
    Hollywood, CA
  • About
    VFX Compositor, "Mindhunter", "House of Cards", "Gone Girl"
    Director, "Apocalypse, CA" (2011)
  • Interested in Sound for Picture
    Yes

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  1. Haha well I did wait about a week to go in and pick it up after Location Sound called me... so unless they've been sitting on it...
  2. Finally got this back from Schoeps, after Location Sound Corp sent it out for me. Works fantastically once again. Still not sure exactly what was fixed or replaced on the CMIT (not even the folks at Location Sound were sure), but Schoeps fixed it free of charge, regardless. Pretty awesome, considering I was expecting a pricey fix for an early serial number mic.
  3. Interesting. Yeah, I had listened to it on three different days over the course of three weeks and it was still producing the same problems. The mic is in the mail at this point, so presumably we'll see. Constantin - I can only hope it comes out as free, but alas... who knows! Thanks gang.
  4. Yeah, location sound corp is sending it out to Schoeps for me. Guessing I won't hear the news until a good amount of time from now, but I'm sure it'll be $$$ regardless - I'll be sure to post what happened, soon as I hear.
  5. This was in LA about a month ago, so not bad on the humidity side of things. If anything, it was a little chilly/dry in the house that day. I'll check the recorder and make sure it's distributing phantom power properly - cautious to test any other mics with the R-44 until then. Certainly a bummer.
  6. Dropped off my Schoeps CMIT 5U at LSC today for service. Had used it recently with a Roland R-44 (no mixer in this case), and about half way thru a simple one-hour long recording, the mic GRADUALLY started to produce a low-level crackle. Had hoped it was just a bad R-44, but the mic performed the same on another recorder when used. Unfortunately, LSC confirmed it was the mic. Given the mic was performing fine early in the same recording, and gradually got worse, I feel like I'm going out on a short limb to assume the R-44 phantom power damaged the mic? Has anyone else experienced this sort of damage? I couldn't find anything regarding the R-44 damaging a mic. The CMIT has an early serial, so it's been around for a bit - I purchased it used over two years ago and it has been a workhorse for me ever since, until this.
  7. haha, fun video and a good INTRO into the concepts of boom removal. Since removing booms from shots is my day job, I'll add a few things to consider: -- When creating a "clean" plate to hide your boom behind, it's always best to use VIDEO instead of a still frame. Why? If you're using a still frame, the film or video grain is frozen in time and could potential stand out (especially in darker, grainy scenes). If a clean video plate wasn't shot on the day, you may have to "build" one yourself - build a "clean" plate video that loops for the duration of the shot. -- In 99.9% of the boom removals I do, almost all of them require both the clean plate and edited footage to be "pinned-down". Meaning, ALL motion needs to be removed from the two plates. Something as simple as a camera operator's heartbeat can have your camera image bouncing around on a sub-pixel (or greater) level. If one of your two plates is unstable and moving around for whatever reason, you'll spot it pretty easily, as if there's an invisible fault line thru your image as the two images move independently of each other. And of course all this only counts for video that is locked off on a tripod.
  8. Excellent, thanks for the heads up! I'll give their listings a try. Figured Galvaston wasn't exactly a hotbed for production. -Chad
  9. No bites yet. If there's anybody that does take this on, I'll certainly pass-on whatever knowledge I have of setting up shots for boom removal (by means of post-VFX), ala what is done on "House of Cards" (my other day job). Details in this thread:
  10. Hello gang, I'm producing a narrative short next week in Galveston, TX. We need a boom-op / mixer for ONE DAY: Friday, September 23rd. Unique shoot with bare bones Los Angeles based crew (travelling) and a young "name" actress attached (she co-wrote it and will star). Please contact me with your rate and a brief example of your experience level. Best way to reach me is via email - chadpeter at hotmail dot com Thanks everybody! -Chad P. My imdb
  11. Morgan, apologies for the long delay. I haven't been on the site in a little bit. Unfortunately, the more complicated stuff (shadows, etc) is just that - complicated. Unless you're fairly well off with Adobe After Effects or some other compositing software, it'd be hard to draw up a step-by-step process - since everything is different from shot to shot... and there's not always an easy answer. In the most simplified of steps, this is usually what I'll do on any given boom-removal shot: 1.) prep the after effects project and import the clean and dirty plates (usually each DPX or EXR image sequences for us on "House of Cards") 2.) "pin down" each plate. "Pinning down" is another way of saying "stabilize" the shot, where we simply remove all forms of movement. Even if a camera is locked-off, you'd be surprised how much extraneous little bumps, etc, seem to make their way to the camera. If you don't do this, occasionally you'll get a shot that has, say, a bumpy clean plate, but a stable dirty plate. You'll see the two plates moving in opposite directions (it ain't pretty). 3.) Place the clean plate in the upper layer and use the pen tool to draw out a matte area (the "clean" area). (Technical speak: we actually create a solid layer and draw our mask shapes on that, and then use the solid layer as an alpha layer over the clean plate). In after effects, I'll typically blur the matte lines about 50 pixels or more, unless the line is close to either the boom or the actor(s). Usually that's all that needs to be done. Sometimes a shot will come in without a clean plate and I'll have to go into photoshop to create my own by painting out the boom. Hopefully that helps a little?
  12. That shouldn't be an issue, unless it's an older lens that "breathes" or distorts heavily when racking. The compositor will have to keyframe a fake blur a bit and have it match the look of the camera blur on the main take. I suppose a bad compositor could screw this up, but... yeah. In any case, it's never a bad thing to capture a clean plate for both 'in focus' and 'out of focus', just to give the compositor options.
  13. As long as the camera is only slightly re-framing while on a TRIPOD (not moving around in a 3D space, but fixed to the head of a motionless tripod), then a little bit of movement is fine and almost guaranteed even if it's a lock-down (someone, somewhere always manages to bump the camera somehow). haha. First and foremost when I composite the clean plate into the shot, I have to first track and stabilize both the shot and the clean plate (remove ALL movement from both). It's possible to get a bit more complicated than that and add a larger move (again, only a pan or tilt on a tripod), IF your clean plate still covers all the applicable space it needs to cover throughout the duration of the shot. Any good compositor should know how to apply the clean plate, so that the shot and the clean plate move in sync with each other. Yes. This. If you have a motion control camera, then you can absolutely have a camera move in 3D space w/ a boom, as long as you're able to get a clean plate. The compositing process will be moderately more difficult, but shouldn't be too terrible, if shot correctly. Yeah, what Lorenzo said. It's not uncommon that the plate and the shot are focused a bit differently, so I'll usually have to add blur (and re-grain) to the clean plate. The only place a compositor would have problems, is if the clean plate is out of focus, but the shot is not.
  14. Hey guys, back again... Lemme see if I can answer those questions... 6k is no more necessary than even 1k to "paint" out a boom from a static shot. Alexa, Red, film, etc. As long as there's a few usable seconds of a clean take without a boom pole, shot on the same camera, at the same resolution, then it won't matter the frame resolution. Resolution really only matters when it comes to something like green screen work - like dealing with someone's hair on a green screen. At 1k, there'd be hardly any detail in the hair. At 6k, you could see every strand, and thusly make a better green screen composite. For something like replacing a boom pole with a "clean" plate, though, your "clean" and "dirty" elements are both the same resolution. Moving shots are tricky. Worst case scenarios involve frame-by-frame removal of a boom or wire. I imagine the sound equivalent would be something like using the pen tool to draw a new wave line. (Please forgive me if that's not even remotely comparable.) haha. There are much better options, typically, but doing something like this on a moving shot would not be advisable unless you have a very talented VFX guy/team who wants to spend a day *attempting* to make the shot usable. And it may not work, depending on the complexity. Of course, damn near anything can be accomplished with VFX/CGI, but the costs get out of hand quickly. A post supervisor would likely scoff at something like this, for better or worse, if they knew they could ADR the scene or moment instead. Some things to keep in mind when shooting scenes in this manner: Be sure the lighting hasn't changed between the filming of the scene and the "clean" plate. The background behind your boom can't have fluctuating light. Things like actors' shadows crossing over the background, etc, etc, will all make the composite that much harder. Any VFX compositor worth their salt will usually figure out a solution to remove possible boom shadows, actors' shadows, etc, but obviously it's not a guarantee. If the background behind your boom is something that moves, like an ocean of water, or a tree in the wind - your "clean" plate certainly won't match the original image. The "clean" plate needs to be the exact same as the original background.
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