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Policar

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Everything posted by Policar

  1. If anyone has a lead on more of these PLEASE let me know.
  2. ​http://www.dvinfo.net/article/production/camgear/what-alexa-and-watercolors-have-in-common.html http://www.dvinfo.net/article/acquisition/sonyxdcam/sony_sgamut_vs_sgamut3.html#prettyPhoto Worth reading. Color negative film (not slides, which is why serious landscape photographers use Velvia or digital to get "insane" colors) grows less saturated as exposure increases, very unlike video. This is why tricks with the lum vs sat curve (in Resolve or Color) can give you a killer "film look" unless highlights blow out under mixed light. SLOG2 is awful. It can't handle mixed lighting, it doesn't clamp saturation, and the color rendering is... weird. But sony cameras don't HAVE to look bad. Let's look at the F55: SLOG3: SLOG3 with Alexa/Dragon style highlight roll-off (color desaturates as brightness increases): Shocking that Sony hasn't made the latter the default. So caught up in tech but so hopelessly out of touch with aesthetics. Fwiw, the C300 Mk II will get this right. Canon has slowly been improving Canon Log and WideDR modes and their color is already dramatically better than SLOG2, not as good as Arri... yet. Word is Canon Log 2 will be on par with Arri. Red started awful but is getting really good, too. But if you have an F5, do yourself a favor and download this: http://community.sony.com/t5/F5-F55/Release-version-3DLUT-s-for-S-Gamut3-Cine-S-Log3/td-p/287847 A7S owners: Can something like this be done with the A7S? A "look" file that clamps saturation at 30IRE. If so I would be much less interested in an A7S2, which NEEDS to be able to do this or it will still have weird color. Internal 4k and 240fps at 1080p would be great, of course. I feel like I'm the only person here whose clients don't request 4k delivery but for me it's not that important, it's just that the internal 1080p in the A7S is really poor relative to the GH4/C300/etc. and 4k gives you room for scaling/stabilization for drone shots.
  3. Policar

    ProDenoise

    I haven't done color in a while, but experienced colorists I know avoid noise reduction like the plague, considering it an extreme last measure for unusable footage. Meanwhile, David Fincher uses what amounts to a very high end noise reduction algorithm on all his features. You just have to decide what works for you. It's all subjective. I'm not sure FCPX needs anything else for color. Experienced editors claim it's up there with Avid for built-in tools and that the round trip with Resolve Lite (free!) is the best thing going. And Resolve is not just free but easy and powerful. Neat Video has a free trial, too. Watch the tutorial and give it a go.
  4. Policar

    ProDenoise

    It looks good to me, too, but macro photography hardly needs as much edge sharpness as a wide shot or something. It's probably decent software. The price is right. You don't need anyone's permission to buy what you want, but Neat Video is absurdly good for the price and you'll consistently hear people raving about it. It's also kinda slow to render and occasionally finicky, but not bad. Worst case scenario you're out $30.
  5. Policar

    ProDenoise

    I really like Neat Video. There is some competition now (Dark Energy) that is earning raves, and which I haven't tried, but $100 is pretty affordable for a good product that will pay for itself almost immediately and they have a $75 version for non-commercial use, too, but it's a little pointless because it can't do 2k or 4k. I have used Neat Video on everything... cleaning up static grain from a 35mm adapter, underexposed 35mm film grain, aliasing from dSLRs, blemishes on skin. It's very useful for outputting a clean noiseless plate into Photoshop to build a matte painting with, to reduce flickering--say, from an LED flashlight, and to provide better mattes for keying. It's worth the money. The one caveat is that, while it's not at all difficult to use, it's easy to screw a shot up with the wrong settings and you have to get creative and think about how much temporal noise reduction to use and when. The more you use it the better results you'll get because there is no one preset for every shot. I'd recommend it.
  6. No. Although Netflix and Amazon apparently want 4k for original content, but not content the buy from others.
  7. ​By f5.6. Fwiw, to whomever above said the Leica lens has better DR.... that just means worse contrast. The whole "vintage" thing was set off largely because worse lenses provided a better "look" on digital cameras.
  8. He's insane. But that lens should be sharp on anything by 50mm. A modern lens will have better contrast. If it looks great on film it won't look worse on digital.
  9. ​As stated before, lenses already have mtf charts, which are fairly easy to read, at least for the enthusiast, and MUCH more useful. Most "4k" lenses aren't hitting close to 100% mtf at APS-C 4k, at least wide open, so to some extent a bad lens is a bad lens even at 8MP. In sum, megapixel ratings for sensors are stupid and tell only a portion of the story. "Container" ratings (1080p/4k/etc.) are even more meaningless... clearly the 5D isn't hitting 100% of 1080p's available spatial resolution. Film stocks had mtf curves, much more useful. "Lens megapixel" ratings are somewhere in-between megapixel ratings and "container" ratings, as regards stupid. Shoot and test and read charts.
  10. Lol... I've been using that workflow since I had a t2i. All they were offering is presets. It works great. Here's one for the t2i. I've blasted aliasing on really tricky shots this way. If you have both chroma and luma aliasing use this. Turn up luma noise reduction and the medium frequency NR. If the frame moves a lot, turn on temporal filtering and experiment. If it's a lock off sometimes better not to. If it's just chroma (noise in hair) duplicate your layer (in After Effects), blur the above layer 12 pixels, use the color transfer mode. The colors will look a little less rich but the aliasing is gone. Both get you footage that's a little softer/less vibrant. Not a lot... but it's a trade-off you lose a bit of punch. Mask it and you're done, though. Works amazing. t2ialiasing.dnp
  11. 6D or D600. Although neither is great for video, but good enough for most clients. FANTASTIC for stills. D750 if you can stretch it. The lenses, however... they don't come cheap either way.
  12. Tried using it at 35mm on my Mark III but found the fall-off unusable unless you want a strong "vignette" effect combined with a "bad edges" effect. Completely unusable at any focal length on FF. Stop kidding yourself.
  13. ​1) Producers prefer the C300 name and one or two jobs easily pays off more than the difference. 2) Lazy, untalented shooters love the ease of use, great economics, ability to bump ISO to ridiculous levels, etc. If you don't need a C300 Mk II to make great images, more power to you. Some of the weaker shooters (such as myself) are fawning over them. But at the end of the day all that matters is what you shoot, and it does seem spec-wise than BM raises the bar. Too high for me. You've answered your own question, you don't need the approval of your producer to choose a camera; you don't need ergonomics designed to be intuitive for a single shooter; you don't need amazing flexibility and low light or reliability and build; what separates your work at the level at which you work is that extra last bit of resolution and DR and raw. I often shoot JPEGs because it's faster to deliver to a client. I'm that lazy, "pro" shooter. You're not. Go forth and blow us away. The C300 Mk II is not for you.
  14. ​I agree. I had to cut C300 footage in with an Alexa in the same feature that also had some Epic footage. The C300 footage was so much easier to cut in with the Alexa (granted, since we had more of it, we shot color checker charts first and were more diligent). I don't know what I'm missing. The only time we had any issues with banding or limited color depth was when there was a sky overexposed like five stops in Canon Log. Even then it was hard to tell the difference. Although YES the Alexa had two stops more highlight detail and a somewhat cleaner highlight roll-off. Granted I'm not terrible adept at this (I've graded my share of features, maybe five or six, but all for TV, though some tier one cable) and I approach things more based on look than on specs, but the C300 and Alexa seem to cut just great for me so long as you shoot competently with both. Obviously the Alexa is a MUCH better camera overall and less limiting. But I think we should respect that the poster above probably has more experience than us, and the colorist for Her has more experience than ALL of us. Basically, we don't have the eye to differentiate between the best C300 footage and Alexa footage we grade (nor, to be fair, has my audience guessed which was which), whereas kedbear does, whereas whoever graded her knows how to match better than we do. But whenever I hear someone express an opinion that they can notice something I can't, I generally defer to that person's authority, since we're all honest online. (Or try to be, I did have inside info on this camera, but never used one! And insulted I might have known someone who had.) Confused by the Dragon-fantatic Colorist, but it is a LOT better than the MX with more resolution than the Alexa. Maybe he was comparing it against the MX? It certainly has worse looking shadows than the Alexa... highlights are good, but not better than the Alexa. (They are much better than the C300; the MX's weren't).
  15. The DVX100 had the impossibly fortuity of being a) an amazing low end broadcast camera/higher-end b camera with fantastic ergonomics and a standard format (miniDV) magically married to an unprecedented feature-set (24p!! and "looks"!!!!!!) that was scooped up by broadcast shooters and wedding videographers alike and b) the best "film look"/hobbyist camera for the money by FAR... with mojo (currently only Arri and to a lesser extent Canon and Dragon have mojo) In my day we had six stops of DR ISO 320 deep focus fixed lenses and 720X480 at best. And we walked six miles through the snow. Uphill. AND WE LIKED IT. NOTHING will ever target those two markets like the DVX did. Currently, Canon has corned one the first. Sony/Panasonic/Black Magic/a whole heck of a lot of others are scrambling to tackle the second. This could do well at making headway into the first, though. Shooters who balk at the awkwardness of a C100 and 24-105mm f4 IS will happily migrate to a more ENG-happy all-in-one package and shooters who balk at $20,000 for a C300 and 4k might happily choose this instead. The added depth of field will be wonderful for those who struggle to focus with a Canon, too. Ask yourself a question.... does raw appeal to you at all? Does a codec bigger than 50Mbps make you happy for the bits or sad for the disk space... If your answer is yes... you want the fun of figuring it out and encoding and ingesting and grading and making magic, this is not for you. If your answer is no... I want to deliver fast and make money.... it might be. The AF100 is VERY well-respected in pro circles. TONS of high end corporate and lower-end tv etc.... is shot on this workhouse cam that is rock-solid. Does the dvx200 have timecode sync? That is the biggest omission. This is really cool but not for me and not for most of you. Curious to see how it does. This (4k low end ENG camera/hobbyist camera for the not-super-techically-obsessed) is new idea. Do not want one, however...
  16. ​I've had to intercut Canon and Alexa footage and it can be shockingly seamless. It's done on a lot of high end shows (Rush, Wolf of Wall Street, Need for Speed, tons of tv and surprisingly it's the Canon on the jib/crane getting the wide and the Alexas picking off coverage... only no one realizes that the shots aren't Alexa). But it sure takes a lot of work and you have to use the Canon either for close ups, low light, or low dynamic range portions of the image or expose more carefully because the Alexa just cleans up in terms of highlight roll off and rolling shutter reduction, though not much else. I'm also ashamed to admit that the best footage I've shot has been on the C100 (and some decent Epic stuff) and some of the worst footage I've shot was on the Alexa. But between the two cameras, the Alexa is SO MUCH better as regards IQ and the ergonomics are a miracle if you're transitioning from 35mm (not from dSLR). The C300 Mk II sample video does look troublingly awful, though. Canon's choice to go 8.7 under and 6.3 over (was it?) really bothers me. I was assuming they'd go for 6.7 under and 8.3 over (the Alexa is 7/7) when I learned about the C300 Mk II well before NAB. I think there will be a lot of C300 Mk II footage that looks so good we assume it's Alexa footage (and fwiw that video doesn't look that great to my eye, so obviously it's all about taste!) and you can redistribute your DR a lot better with a 10 bit codec than an 8 bit one and the "looks" designed to match other cameras will make this thing sell. Canon's roll-off doesn't oversaturate like SLOG2, but it's not quite Alexa. Blue Ruin was made by a lot of my friends. And I think it looks better than the video you mentioned, which has a cool anamorphic look and not much as regards composition or purpose and the lighting is very "broad strokes." Oddly enough, their mantra was more "camera doesn't matter, look doesn't matter, story matters" and yet it's the best-looking C300 feature I've seen. Really talented group of just awesome people! I don't think you could shoot Skyfall on a C300, though. Canon is a little plasticky and digital, though the look is excellent overall and the overall ergonomics/workflow make it very attractive at the low-end professional segment. I anticipate the C300 Mk will be the best of the best overall below Alexa (with the Dragon, which is great, cleaning up when you have the light to feed that hungry beast, but not under challenging conditions....), but the Alexa is the gold standard for a reason. That said, if your work looks worse than the video you've mentioned, and you have the budget to work at that level, camera isn't what's holding you back.
  17. Awful. Truly awful. The C300 launch shorts looked better and they didn't look particularly outstanding. The C100 Mk II wedding video looked better and it had some garish post work and was clearly done on a lower budget. I still want one.
  18. I'd hope it would out-perform the dragon in low light. The skintone dragon's image is very noisy at 800 ISO in tungsten and difficult-to-use beyond that. Still looks pretty cool. The bigger sensor will matter more for sharpness than added pixels and if you can rent this, you can afford a few truckloads of lights.
  19. Sony exaggerates DR. As does Red. Canon and Arri don't. C300 and Red MX hold about 12 stops. C300 is often underrated due to incorrect handling of super whites. F5 about 13. Not the claimed 14. Dragon just over 13. Not the claimed 16+. Still world class better than F5 and almost Alexa league. Alexa 14.5... but distributed more in the highlights because it, too, uses some sort of dual gain path. So the tonality is really special. Red claims softness and smearing in Alexa footage due to the dual gain approach but I don't see it. The image here will look like a better C300 image except with three stops more highlight detail, which is where you want it, and in 4k. Other than inferior skew, this will give an image a lot like a 4k Alexa with even a bit more DR and with poor slow motion options. The b cam mode is dangerous. Better AF could be interesting. We'll see if lightning strikes twice but as elevated as the price is this is a camera for rental houses and owner ops....
  20. ​Yep. To be fair, plenty of testers have shot with it. I can't tell you why, though, or I might lose my job! It's subjective, but I would say better resolution, better color, and better dynamic range amount to... better! Priorities are subjective, though. Any camera will only give you back the best of what you put in front of it.
  21. How are they creating a revolution? By having a lens mount no one can use and an expensive camera with esoteric specs and difficult-to-use assets?
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