Axel

Short film 'Choices'. The hopeful junior filmmaker imagines a battle of the top low budget camera toys, filmed in stop-motion-like animation, using AAEs puppet tool. Dialogs from Rocky? Boxring represented by Andrews table? The Pocket beats the GH3 and the 7D to pieces. The 5D says: 'We won, it's over.' The Pocket answers: 'It ain't over til it's over' - and kicks the 5D over the edge. It falls with the Wilhelms scream, hits the ground and falls apart. The filmmaker takes the Pocket and smiles, the Pocket smiles back. They leave, iris fade-out, THE END. Must find a better ending. 

That's a really great idea. There's so much focus on RAW and DR at the moment, but those of us who aren't just about ultimate filmic-look replication can feel a little neglected.
 
I love this site and I'm continually impressed by what Andrew does here, but I do sometimes wonder if the level of time, technical hoop-jumping and non-camera hardware requirements for RAW shooting (at least at the present time) verges on being non-inclusive.
 
"One of the guiding principals of EOSHD is that nobody should be blocked from practicing their art and executing their talent as a cinematographer or filmmaker due to the cost of equipment. All the equipment I recommend on the blog has to be accessible for nearly everyone."
 
Time is money, as they say.
 
Had I the time, patience and money, I would undoubtedly be shooting RAW all the time, but regrettably I have very little of any of those things, so I'm feeling a bit left out. *Sob*
 
 

 
 
 

But they do show aesthetic aspects, just not directly. Things like sharpness, noise and dynamic range are trivially correlated with aesthetic judgements, so controlled measurements of these properties are much more useful for comparisons than trying to generalize about the character of different cameras by watching finished films produced under different conditions by different film makers.
 
In principle, any aesthetic quality that is sufficiently well understood can be measured scientifically.

Absolutely, and I hate wisenheimers as well, must be my shadow.
 
The poor threadstarter has given up long ago.
 
That was my first experience with greenscreen: I read a book about Final Cut 2 in 2001 and chroma keying was mentioned. It looked easy. I had a bright green folder on my desk which I taped on the door. I put my VX1000 (DV PAL) on the tripod. I painted red color over my wrist, focussed on my hand and made a strangling gesture. Then I filmed myself, mimicking being strangled. Of course I had 'the hand of horror' in mind. Compositing was a matter of trial and error. I had to deinterlace before I scaled the hand, I had to get rid of the arm, I had to add the cut area with the bone (Photoshop) and animate it. It was far from perfect, but it was big fun. It was diffuse daylight, and though my hand was close to the folder, I only had a few frames with spill. I simply cut them out, that looked even more creepy (funny, actually).
 
I recommend a playful, respectless start. If you haven't done it and only read about all things that let it go wrong, you'll be discouraged.

You are not an idiot, I guess my english isn't very good. With 'unless you work in a set like this, you can do with 4:2:0' I was trying to say that it is not good for 4:2:0, because of the overall spill. The sentence may have been grammatically wrong.
 
If there are roughly 4 pixels on the edges where green and foreground mix in 4:2:0 without any spill, you can imagine how many there will be with a lot of spill ...
 
As human being, with eyesight limited to 4:2:0, you probably see purple dots if you close your eyes in this studio. Personally, I have never been on such a set. But I can't believe that color keying will suffice to get a clean matte for the Peter Jackson team. There will still be some trainees who spend hours and hours on rotoscoping additionally. And you can detect another trick in all LOTR movies: The actors are always backlit. Read jghardings post here.

Here in video i did shoot with Nikon D5200 and flaat 11. no collor correct.. Straight from camera.. DR isnt bad with D5200 ;)
 
http://youtu.be/MR5a-dxg7-g
 
And here is the "fixed"
 
http://youtu.be/J9IsZFtdQ-I

If you expose for blown out highlights, push shadows, clean with neat video, you can capture just as much dynamic range from the GH3 as you can from Magic Lantern RAW.
 
https://vimeo.com/76030718

As I wrote, scaling down is about anti-aliasing the edges through interpolation of pixels. What you stated before, that 4:2:0, by merging pixels, get's miraculously 4:4:4, is wrong. 
 

 
You will never reverse the 4:2:0 to 4:4:4.
 
However, unless you are working in a set like this:

 
... you can do with 4:2:0. Because a green screen will have only green pixels in 4:2:0. It's the outlines that cause problems. The Keylight method to blur the edges and mix them with purple is no longer state of the art, as mentioned above.

Hey everyone, I'm new to the site. Just wanted to show a video I shot and edited. Shot on 5D MK III using ML raw format. Hope you enjoy and thanks for watching!
 
https://vimeo.com/77063826

I really hope there will be a new wave of influental independant films that deserve this name. Even worse than being dependant on the politics of major production companies is the situation in my country. It has the "FFA", an acronym for film promotion association, founded in 1968, and it effectively finances german theatrical films with tax money, but approving the standards, which can only be described as uncinematic and boring. It's a federal association that decides if scripts are worth the investment, and you can easily imagine what that means for creativity and originality. 
 
I particularly hope, that indie filmmakers will stop to think retro. If they want to reinvent cinema, there is no frigging 'cinematic look' to be followed, no grain filters, no exaggerated DoF-gimmicks, no oange-teal-'blockbuster'-grading, that would be embarrassing. There has to be a good and revolutionary story that dictates it's own aestethics, preferably clean and straight.
 
Don't dream about fancy imagery, you've got a camera with sufficient color depth to look good on a big screen. Now it's time to tell something!

I really hope there will be a new wave of influental independant films that deserve this name. Even worse than being dependant on the politics of major production companies is the situation in my country. It has the "FFA", an acronym for film promotion association, founded in 1968, and it effectively finances german theatrical films with tax money, but approving the standards, which can only be described as uncinematic and boring. It's a federal association that decides if scripts are worth the investment, and you can easily imagine what that means for creativity and originality. 
 
I particularly hope, that indie filmmakers will stop to think retro. If they want to reinvent cinema, there is no frigging 'cinematic look' to be followed, no grain filters, no exaggerated DoF-gimmicks, no oange-teal-'blockbuster'-grading, that would be embarrassing. There has to be a good and revolutionary story that dictates it's own aestethics, preferably clean and straight.
 
Don't dream about fancy imagery, you've got a camera with sufficient color depth to look good on a big screen. Now it's time to tell something!

The ninja records 10 bits or 8 bits in a 10 bit wrapper Maybe you meant convergent designs nanoflash However 8 bit was never useless but it is better as a finalising format and not for colour correction or capture. Although Canons C log on their 1DC looks amazing the problem is it costs £8500 but the game has moved on and it could have moved on much earlier but the manufacturers chose to cripple the cameras.
 
I don't agree demand determines supply Heh heh The demand is high for the BMPC but sadly few are getting made. Okay joking but that does highlight the point that demand is high for the cameras BMD make and yet none of the main manufacturers are satisfying that demand because it would ruin their pro markets and £15000 cameras.
Marketing does create demand and the way things are going in a very cynical way.
http://www.moviemachine.tv/video/comments-on-4k-philip-hodgetts/77230136/

An f2.8 fixed zoom  starting at 24mm on a 1" sensor will not give you much of a wide angle nor bokeh. High compression in camera may look great but so high it leaves concerns. Uncompressed HDMI which I assume is 8 bit will "Another assumption" be for 1080p.
For the price and lack of professional usability accept for gimics I fail see what use it is. Yes you will get a little bokeh using its built in ND filters but to little room with the lens for anything meaningful accept to shoot demo footage that shows what extremes it can do. At its price point If you don't want highly compressed 4k then other cameras have more to offer.

Great fan of making ofs, fan of the DV Rebel's Guide, great fan of the traditional make-believe approach that the great masters of the silent movie era began, great fan of meticulous storyboards and so forth, I hope this old clip might inspire you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0

I have done greenscreen compositing with my DVX100, with my XH A1 and nothing since, just 'tests'. Both must be considered inferior by any means compared with modern cameras - and modern software.
 
Back then it was Ultimatte and/or Primatte, plugged in After Effects. Today I would highly recommend to try the very easy Keying-Filter within FCP X, should you happen to have access to it. To achieve visually perfect results, you have to reveal the 'advanced' options, but once you allow the new background's colors to counteract spill (tool: 'Light Wrap') and 4:2:0 edges (instead of complementary tint and much edge feathering), you will love it.
 
Being in no way an expert for chroma keying, I still think the spill issue doesn't get much better with 4:4:4. Reduce spill by seperately lighting the greenscreen (as recommended above or in every greenscreen tutorial), that's more than half the battle. 
 
exotics wrote:
 
 
Arguable. The larger the green background, the more spill, almost unavoidable. A very rich broadcaster in my country built a green hell of a news studio, and it looks terrible. I followed the advice of Maschwitz in his DV Rebel:
Make the green background as small as possible, make it a green towel, light it as little as possible (but as evenly as possible, outside, with an overcast sky, you will get the least spill). Let it just barely cover your foreground object, cut away everything else with garbage masks. Even allow an occasional hand or foot to stick out, a few frames of roto won't hurt you, but the key will be better.
 
Of course, this is not an option for a 'broadcaster' or someone who needs to isolate an ensemble of dancers.
 
Testing greenscreen techniques is cheap and easy. Multi-talented cats move and have whiskers. Let your cat play with a laser pointer in front of a green background. Then comp it into your slightly tilt-shifted kitchen and let yourself be hunted. The incredible shrinking EOSHD user.

If they had added a large sensor they would have cleaned up and wiped out most of their customers for their pro line. On the other hand in order to build such nice cameras as they do, they need a production line and design department that cant just sit idle after each camera and technology has in the past moved on and enabled them to do this. However that works against its own customers when they deny them cheap modern technology and bring about new companies that fill the gap and the reason why we see companies like atomos convergent design BMD getting a foothold. Although this camera will sell to many the growing competition sony face will also grow stronger because of this.
 
In my opinion this is a plaster on a limb amputation and Sony really need to rethink their short term strategy as they are losing goodwill as well as losing out to the competition. Many like Sony have gone down. Shame they just cant see it.

Classic Sony SKU compartmentalisation! Camcorders are unpopular, they want to shift more of them, so the add a premium feature to an old-school camcorder in hope of shifting units made on a similar production line.
 
Meanwhile they can slowly squeeze money from compact and mirrorless so they do,  removing features in order to leak them in slowly and create demand every release.
 
They could put a 4K mobile phone sensor in a camcorder body if they like and flog it on the stats.
 
Even though I sometimes wish I had it, the video look is what made me sell the RX100. It wasn't a matter of DOF or 24/25fps, it just looked wrong, when I cut it with soft Canon EOS 600D  ML2.3 the latter looked nicer. Plus you couldn't grade RX100 much because of the compression. Same with FS700, I got where I wanted colour wise in the end, but it really was falling apart at high ISOs.
 
This obsession with giving awful compression, unless you buy from a line that isn't selling is arrogant and cynical. The C300 has wiped out the FS100/7000 in corporate/TV/ad hire. For the most part that's because of the bitrate and ergonomics.
 
So I keep saying I want to justify the RX10... but do I? Statistically it's great, but will I just be disappointed with another videoish camera that doesn't reach its full potential, so they can sell me another next year?

With raw photography, with a conservative exposure, 'ETTC', you also get a misrepresantation and end up in having to change the exposure in post and eventually reduce some noise. Why? 
 
 
Because what we have here is a 12-bit image. Without any curve applied to the quantization (for the preview!), an 8-bit image can only show less than 5 stops of latitude (256-128-64-32-16, anything below 16 becomes indistinguishable on any common 8-bit display, and in reality none can show values above 240 as well). This is an extremely low dynamic range, and even with a new tone-mapping, the values visible then are a fantasy and by no means represent the true relation between, say, 1354 and 11433 (just above 3 stops in the infathomably depth of 12-bit). 
 
What we are demanding when we call the washed-out images a 'flaw' is effectively a display with an upstream LUT to let us see an incorrect, very much compressed image that we are used to in our tiny 8-bit universe. Something like this is probably built into an Alexa or the like.
 
The workaround to shove the ISOs down also (in the preview) just grabs a very narrow range of what we actually record. The same is true for external devices, if their monitoring is not capable of processing 12-bit raw (which is?), for whatever reason, like Germys Atomos Samurai, which would be suitable for 10-bit, for which the built-in histogram should be reliable, but of course not any LCD viewer.
 
As a digital projectionist from 2000 until 2011, I very often compared the MJEPG2000 DCPs (typically 12-bit) to my own 8-bit ambitious amateur stuff. And no matter if I had used opendcp to convert it or just plugged a laptop to the scaler, the differences were huge. It never was an issue of spacial resolution!
 
Three deliberately provocative theses on where we stand with our appreciation of raw:
 
1. All DSLR bodies have a lot of knobs, buttons and dials as well as complicated menu options and presets. All of these gadgets are phony ways to cripple (potentially) high quality images to some pleasing-looking consumer-jpegs or mpegs. White balance, ISO, looks for different conditions:
Crooks!
There are two things that count, and neither of them live in the camera's body: Focus ring, aperture ring (EDIT: Well, one: 'shutter').
 
2. We still record, grade and view in 8-bit. To shoot raw in order to get a better 8-bit video seems comparable to killing a whale for a cup of cod liver. And we hunt the whale with blindfolds.  
 
3. ETTR will have highlights and some midtones. That the graded images look naturalistic although there are no real shadows could very well be limited to 8-bit. 
 
Germy1979 wrote:
 
Unfortunately, afaik, Neat can not neat raw video. Removing noise (useless, redundant data) should be the first step. To do everything right, there is probably no alternative for the BMPCC buyers to buy a full version of Resolve as well. Or ETTR for 8-bit.

I really hope there will be a new wave of influental independant films that deserve this name. Even worse than being dependant on the politics of major production companies is the situation in my country. It has the "FFA", an acronym for film promotion association, founded in 1968, and it effectively finances german theatrical films with tax money, but approving the standards, which can only be described as uncinematic and boring. It's a federal association that decides if scripts are worth the investment, and you can easily imagine what that means for creativity and originality. 
 
I particularly hope, that indie filmmakers will stop to think retro. If they want to reinvent cinema, there is no frigging 'cinematic look' to be followed, no grain filters, no exaggerated DoF-gimmicks, no oange-teal-'blockbuster'-grading, that would be embarrassing. There has to be a good and revolutionary story that dictates it's own aestethics, preferably clean and straight.
 
Don't dream about fancy imagery, you've got a camera with sufficient color depth to look good on a big screen. Now it's time to tell something!

I really hope there will be a new wave of influental independant films that deserve this name. Even worse than being dependant on the politics of major production companies is the situation in my country. It has the "FFA", an acronym for film promotion association, founded in 1968, and it effectively finances german theatrical films with tax money, but approving the standards, which can only be described as uncinematic and boring. It's a federal association that decides if scripts are worth the investment, and you can easily imagine what that means for creativity and originality. 
 
I particularly hope, that indie filmmakers will stop to think retro. If they want to reinvent cinema, there is no frigging 'cinematic look' to be followed, no grain filters, no exaggerated DoF-gimmicks, no oange-teal-'blockbuster'-grading, that would be embarrassing. There has to be a good and revolutionary story that dictates it's own aestethics, preferably clean and straight.
 
Don't dream about fancy imagery, you've got a camera with sufficient color depth to look good on a big screen. Now it's time to tell something!

Probably the same Tom says on the BM forum:
 
 

That sets my mind at rest: In raw mode, you can use every ISO you want, without changing the exposure of the clip.
 

ISO is an analogy for the sensitivity of film stock. The use of this term is *helpful* for estimating the relative sensitivity of a sensor with a certain gain chosen. But actually vague and incorrect. Native ISO means the signal is neither amplified nor attenuated.

Gain can be applied in an analogue way to the sensor A/D converters or it can be applied digitally after the data leaves the sensor at the native ISO.
 
So this guy araucaria is increasing the gain digitally.
 
And gets annoyed at the noise.
 
That is really this argument in a nutshell. Utter time wasting.

I say, let's wait for some moving images. Noise is hard to evaluate from a single image. Yes, if it was a stills camera ...
 
It may be bad, it may actually look good. You know, all the high bitrate - small GOP hacks of the GH2 never added any real detail to the images, they dithered obscure parts in a way like film did, creating so called 'temporal samples'.
 
Yes, I know, iso noise is fundamentally different from film grain. But, like Andrew wrote, it still is something people add voluntarily to make their videos look more organic (they add random film grain simulation, which like iso noise, has nothing to do with the pixels in the image, it's an artificial layer).
 
If it really turns out to be an 'issue', there is a good chance that tools like Neat (or the pro version of Resolve?) can fix it easily.
 
Raw photography is also not free from noise. Adobe Raw within Photoshop has it's own NR filter. The noise you detected on the ship is nothing I would have found in original size (1080 viewed on a 1080 monitor from a viewing distance appropriate to, er, cinema), my guess is that it is negligible for video in most situations. In this photo, the noise disappeares completely with a mild 18% luma NR (visible in 400%), no big deal, since one has to treat the raw with several agents anyway.
 
What is more, the sensor is said to be comparable to that of the BMCC. The first Brawley demos also showed some noise, but it isn't discussed as problem anymore, afaik. Maybe it can be avoided altogether, maybe not. No reason to despair.
 
Paramount for me, I like the images, I am not for missing the wood for the trees. Or worse, to ignore the path underneath your feet! 

You are right. It is a default Photoshop preset applied to every raw file. And setting it from "25" to "0" practically eliminates what is described as "noise". Keep in mind, that camcorders with intelligent compression algorithms also develop raw images under the hood, that they add gain, NR and sharpening. But sharpening must be applied to the BMPCC images, obviously. Perhaps there are better methods (.i.e. in Resolve, as a last step of grading then, there are also discussions everywhere whether to apply NR first or last, plainly the right answer is first, the node model makes it easy to get the order right - only that there is no denoiser in Lite :( ), but I guess it just needs some understanding on how the tools work:
 
 
 
This is from here. Hystery begone!