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An additional barrier that my above approach helps me side-step is the disparity between technical resolutions and aesthetic preferences. What I mean by that is that when we talk about resolutions (4K / 1080p / 720p / 576i / 480p etc) there are a bunch of associations with these. No-one is linking these with aesthetic decisions - no-one says they're shooting for the "480p look"! Any discussion of these is typically in the "more is better" context, or at least in the "1080p vs 4K" realm. However, my image analysis indicates that there are quite a lot of images that are deliberately created with an aesthetic that aligns with 720p or lower! Therefore, if I tried to "map" aesthetic preferences to technical resolutions I would be fighting all these connotations I have from these technical resolutions. However, linking these things to film doesn't have nearly the same associations. People don't talk about 16mm as being "crap" whereas they sure do if you're talking about a 720p camera or timeline resolution. The other challenge I have with the "I like that" and "I don't like that" is that I don't really know what that means. If I can look at an image I like and work out it's equivalent to 20mm film (if such a size existed) and I worked out that a camera/lens combo was also around 20mm film equivalent, then I could "link" that camera/lens combo with that aesthetic, or even that reference. Alternatively, if I shot with my GH7 in Prores HQ (which is likely to be around 50mm film equivalent or more) and a lens that is in that ballpark, but I wanted that 20mm film equivalent look, then I'd know to just adjust the Film Look Creator to align to the 20mm film equivalent settings, and I'd have that look. Speaking of using the Film Look Creator to adjust to various sizes of film, it comes with presets for 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and 65mm, but I did some interpolation and came up with the following values for intermediary values, so it can be used for in-between things too. From the initial image analysis I've done so far, lots of stuff shot on desirable vintage cinema lenses is often in those in-between areas, so this isn't just about using the FLC grain panel to emulate film, it's really about using it to emulate the softness of the final image, which is a result of the combination of: - haze / smoke in the scene - filters (such as diffusion filters, haze filters, beauty filters, OLPF filters, etc) - lens sharpness at a given F-stop - sensor resolution in the readout mode it's in - image processing (such as NR, sharpening, etc) - compression - etc. If you're emulating lenses then the edges might also be softer than the middle, so that would be a separate thing, but you can get quite far using a combination of: - Lens correction in the Edit tab - Round power-window to adjust vignette - Round power-window in combination with Tilt-Shift Blur OFX to emulate edge softness -
Yes, they knew 100% what the heck they were doing, as well as the place and technique better suited for that place. As for the TikTok videos having huge impact? Yep. Are they art? No way. "Content" is not art. Never will be. -
By fuzzynormal · Posted
Good write up! I've run the gauntlet as well. My conclusion is that what you wrote above is the thing that'll get me through, so I accept it. And why not? -
For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference. There are no numbers to look up and understand things from. It applies to the equipment: Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available). Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time. If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc. If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image. It's literally what they're designed to do. How much do they do this though? Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc. It applies to the look we're creating: Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution". How much is desired? What are the references? I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including: My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4. How soft is it though? Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want! I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things. Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help. My solution is to reference things back to film. I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film. This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful. 8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema. My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways... Texture, which is what I've talked about so far: - I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between) - I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference. These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related. Dynamic Range and Contrast: - How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process? - What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s? or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period? Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets. Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution. When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense. What else? Image stability is another one. 8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look. Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others. Depth of field is another one. Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand. There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me. The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in. Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like: The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm. I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe. The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens. Any other combo doesn't make sense. (This is an actual example I've worked out through testing). The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments. This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes. (This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work) iPhone? Where does it sit in all this? It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance. GH7. What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting). What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic. I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.
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