karoliina

Canon 1DX mark II. Picture style fine detail. Contrast -4, Saturation -2, Sharpening 0, 4K 25p.

Hello I recently switched from my Blackmagic Cinema Camera to Canon 1DX mark II. I have collected couple of framegrabs to Flickr gallery (full size jpegs available) from 4K video footage I shot yesterday. These are ungraded and shot with Fine Detail picture style with contrast at minimum. https://flic.kr/s/aHskwCzqqD I hope this helps for those who are curious on how the 1DX II looks. I plan to retest later with Technicolor Cinestyle that I installed after taking these video clips. I shot the clips by using Transcend 1000x 128 GB CF-card, still don't have CFast, but it seems the Transcend is speedy enough 25p continuous and even can record few seconds of 4K 60p before the recording stops. Best Regards, Karoliina Salminen Graded frame (check the ungraded ones from Flickr):

There is this easier option for Resolve: it also runs on Linux. Run Ubuntu on the fast machine with fast Geforce 680. Very easy to setup and very similar operating system to OSX. I have several Macs and then the biggest number crunchers run Linux. Blender is therefore ran on Linux natively (3d animation/compositing). Also I do not need to use 5dtorgb converter with my DSLR footage since 5dtorgb uses ffmpeg to do the conversion. I use ffmpeg directly from command line, it is fully scriptable, and my footage converts by itself after I run my script convert. Even better: add huge raid to this Linux machine and share the drive to network and mount it from your Macs to access it with FCPX. If gigabit ethernet is in between, the speed is reasonable. Macs and Ubuntus live very nicely together. They are almost cousins from technical perspective unlike OSX vs. Windows which have about nothing in common. I have been tempted to try Hackintosh though to run FCPX and Motion fast.

I personally prefer realism in cinema: exceptional lifelike detail and lifelike smoothness in all movement. This obviously sets higher requirements for the quality of the set and for the quality of the makeup on the actors. The actors must have fashion photography quality makeup and not a "theatrical makeup". Set must be more true (or CGI) rather than bunch of painted styrofoam because it shows up when the detail is there. My vision is that cinema eventually becomes surreal experience where it is hard to distinguish from actually being there. It is like painting would no longer be a painting but a high quality photograph. Photograph is still art, so is 3D imagery. It is surely different kind of art than the 2D realm with all the motion blur and loss of detail and grain going on (and I have to admit I like sometimes a grainy look like the new Battlestar Galactica series had), but the true pushing the boundaries and advancing on this area will move towards more lifelike experience. The lifelike experience has nothing to do with TV soap operas that are not at all lifelike experience. They are like looking a doll house. Lifelike experience is a deep immersion like you would enter the Matrix. It was quite obvious with Avatar what the limitation with 24p with the 3D imagery is. Always when there was motion blur, it killed the immersion and it made me feel like I had glasses that were incompatible with my vision. There is of course alternative for those who do not prefer lifelike images. Like not everybody prefer photography but prefers more oil paintings. Or someone likes hand drawn cartoons rather than computer rendered Pixar films. I do not have narrow look on these, everything has its place and there is hardly anything somebody wouldn't like and other wouldn't hate. I am very much looking forward to seeing Hobbit and what might come from James Cameron also. I hope at 48 fps the 3D will be more lifelike and more immersive than the 24p that feels like having eyesight problem at times (I do not have eyeglasses, but 24p at 3D looks to me a bit like putting way too strong eyeglasses on that are not fitting with my vision). My brain also selectively wants to blank unfitting elements from the 3D scene, and it turns out in cases of motion blur, only one eye signal sometimes reach the brain. Quite far cry from what my vision about a Matrix like virtual reality would be.

The 5D mark III in this comparison obviously looks a lot better than the NEX-7. However, it loses big time for GH2 in detail especially in the grass. The grass captured by 5D mark III looks muddy and to my eye it is not pleasing but feels like out of focus or like way too heavily compressed jpeg. Honestly, I would prefer a camera that resolves more 1920x1080 rather than SD especially because it comes with a high definition price tag anyway. And where would I need 2k pixels in the file if I only get 1K pixels or less resolution? Found a resolution chart test from vimeo, shot with 5D mark III and Sony EX1: https://vimeo.com/39536799

I think the sharpen filter will not make it more detailed, it will just make it look like it had the details it has lost already. I tried sharpening the Proud Beast footage on DaVinci Resolve with different settings, and my finding was that all attempts to make it look sharper only promoted false details and made the picture look rougher. It was really difficult to find a value that would be low enough to not make it look worse. Very modest sharpening can be used post, but basically what is not there in the original footage when it is shot will not be recovered by the sharpening filter because it simply is impossible to invent non-existent details out of nowhere.

I think Canon does not care if the buyers that already bought will be disappointed. They more care about getting new purchases and of course the negative feedback from those who already bought will affect that. Canon could easily come up with a camcorder at the same price point of 5D mark III and not lose any nights of sleep for that. However, I think they may have clever engineers but their managers may not be very clever and they may not be working the most efficient way they could. Therefore we can expect that the decisions will range from rather silly to somewhat okay and by a chance they may sometimes even positively succeed. I am looking forward to see what the Cinema EOS will be before I purchase anything. And by the way; I have a theory why [technically] 5D mark III video is soft. I investigate further on how debauer algorithms work before I talk more about it. Best Regards, Karoliina Salminen (just joined, first post from me here, my twitter is @karoliinasalmin)