Pierre_move

The dummy of cinematography opened his mouth again?? He's an ok cinematographer but as a person he sure lacks a lot... C500 too should have blown Alexa out of the water according to him.. other cinematographers just laughed

If by "pretty sure" you mean that you just made something up, than yes you're pretty sure indeed. BMD Film color space does not bake in a teal orange grade, that's silly.

 

Just to make myself clear - I was only talking about BMCC and BMPCC. Not the BM4K or the URSA - haven't seen any strange biass toward certain colors in RAW from BM4K. I spent days upon days with BMCC and BMPCC to find that the blues always pop out strangely together with the oranges without me wanting this effect during daylight shots - I just pushed the saturation slightly and bam I could see the blues/oranges getting too much attention. It drove me almost insane - maybe it's the sensor characteristics (doubt it heavily) or maybe it's the color science. This did not happen on any camera I used previously or after so that's why "I'm pretty sure" - because it happened.

 

And "RAW" does not give you the oppurtunity to have "any look" - you're tied to what the sensor is capable of and what the color science has already done to the RAW data - destructive modification. When you're getting "RAW" means that you're only getting a bayered image - this does not mean that the image has not gone through some processing. People will hopefully start understanding this after Apertus releases the AXIOM camera and people with some programming skills start to play with the color science on the most bottom level.

Is it a LUT that gives all Blackmagic cameras that blue cast? Or is it the camera itself? 

I'm pretty sure it's the color science that they built into the camera. To sort of give you a ready to go "teal&orange" base .. but it's pretty botched if you ask me and imho one of the reasons why people are in 95% of cases not able to produce a nice colors with the BMCC and BMPCC. AJA too seems to be doing everything they can to botch the picture before the person has an oppurtunity to work on it.

 

heh so much for RAW when you're only getting bayered data but with already destroyed color information thanks to not so great "color science"..

This is one of the better videos for a7S color, but there is still something unnatural about the color from the a7S.  The Nikon D810 colors look on the money.

 

Michael

 

Yes the colors aren't any good for videos - good for photos but not for "cinema". F5/F55/F65 and F35 are miles ahead in proper color science for moving imagery (even though the A7S has a technically more advanced chip).

It's funny how much people give credit to different cameras. Newsflash, give a pro a 5dmarkIII/a7s and it will still look good. The crew will complain like hell but in the end, they will make it work.

 

For example, that "atrocious" picture you complain about... would look about 99.5% the same on an Alexa. Funny. The difference is that an experienced crew would've changed the shot and white balance it around until the background looked slightly better. But it's not the camera doing it. Yeah weird, I know.

99,5% the same? ROFL Well that's some bunch of ugly and smelly bollocks for sure.. you're probably colorblind or just way too biased. And when it comes to experienced crews... well of course if you can erase the shortcomings of many cameras with enough lights but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the picture straight out of the camera, with average lighting, with mild color correction. Alexa can do magic even with less than perfect lightning and that's why pro filmmakers love it - the colors just never look wrong and the dynamic range saves the day in a lot of cases.. there's just never a color that looks totally out of place like with the most of the cameras.

 

Just check Shane Hurlbut's tests - the difference between the Alexa and the others is astounding in many many situations. Or check what does Art Adams write in other articles about the way that Alexa handles the colors http://www.dvinfo.net/article/post/making-the-sony-f55-look-filmic-with-resolve-9.html .. his articles are the best on the whole internet when it comes to the way that cameras spit out the colors.

Some people even say that when a camera records raw, you can get the colors any way you want. Such bs it makes my head spin.. most of the color corrections made in the cam make it impossible to recover even the original color information back - it's lost forever. I really wonder what BM uses in their BMCC and BMPCC cameras - as the look they have gone the way to simulate some of the Kodak Vision3 features (the blue channel is a suspect) - but it ends up in a very big mess.

 

Also It's really astonishing that the only company which gets it right is Arri and to a small degree there was a success with Sony F35. Sadly.. analog is still the king and the more the company pushes to get the color to match the analog features, the easier the work with the cam is. Either it's just a matter we grew up on analog and therefore we love it, or that the analog really makes a better emotional connection to our primal brains. The first time I was photoshoping first pics from pro digital SLRs I was like "What the hell is this crap? What's with the colors?"

 

Btw that pic from a7s looks atrocious.. the skin tones, the weird magenta stuff in the background.. yuck

Canon is the honey badger of the DSLR companies.. it just does not give a ....

First question that came to my mind was: if they can make money selling it at 3K$, how much money were they making selling it at 4K$??

 

Does it really matter? They're all about being "disruptive" and I bet there's nothing comparable to this in terms of features/price comming out this NAB. If the color science/calibration is tasty enough (previous 2 BMC attempts sadly sucked)  this camera might be the next best thing. The law is that the footage should look already very good right from the cam.. it should not require 10 hours of work and 50 of nodes in Resolve. This is what Arri did and hit the jackpot. Even the old Red camera footage looked quite nice and filmic/artistic/cinematic off the cam.

I'm right now at a grading studio with our guys trying to finish a deadline and during a little break (procrastination as usual) we decided that from these pics we would chose the Kineraw as the one with the most useful colors.

 

The most visible thing is that Both 5D and BMCC fail at capturing the color of the Candle. Plus 5D has alot of funky unnecessary colors that need to be tamed which is extra work.

I'd say it's mathematically impossible to match the footages in all situations - the easiest situation would be a scene without with a nice flat 5600k lighting (or a nice outdoor overcast). 

 

The pro cameras are pro for one thing - they look pro in most situations even before you start doing color corrections.

 

But man am I so glad that the ML Raw beats the crap out of the overpriced Canon's C series.

Achtung! I said comparable not the same, and it really is. CMOS sensor technology has caught up with the F35's cutting edge 6 year old CCD technology in terms of everything but rolling shutter.

 

The sensor is way ahead of the image processor but with raw on the 5D you are taking the image processor completely out of the pipeline.

 

Therefore your colour science is almost entirely in post.

 

 

but let's not forget that there are alot of things happening when the analog signal gets converted to digital on CMOS which we can call the manufacturer's mojo.There are always some necessary calibrations and etc going on which result in vastly different outcomes. So if you get raw from specimen A and raw from specimen B, they are never equal which also means that alot of the information that was in the analog stage got lost or changed forever and so with normal color-correction procedures you can never get what you want - you would have to re-colorize the picture by hand.

 

Plus the chips are different from every manufacturer and therefore must create different outcomes (+ it's CCD vs CMOS so that's even more difference)

 

Just look at how BMCC butchers the cyans,blues and orange colors - even in RAW we see this weirdness either cause by the sensor itself (doubt that), calibration or the in-device image processing. The blues and the oranges just want to poke my eye out in this comparison - and it's because of what is already in the RAW file. That's why BMCC gets less love as one would think it should deserve as the first cheap RAW camera.. the picture just feels wierd - the colors on that thing are like a botched breast augmentation job. Not to mention what happens in low-light - the colors are completey murdered.

 

(source - an awesome comparison by Cinema5D, Top BMCC, Bottom 5D mkiii)

This compares to the image quality of the Sony F35 (Superman Returns, Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland) which cost $250,000 just 5 years ago.

 

 

the video sure looks cool but let's not get carried away too much .. F35 is light-years ahead of 5d MIII in terms of cinematic color science.. not to mention a global shutter and a few more stops of dynamic range ;)

For me it is either this little chinese camera or the new 4K BMCC. I just love the color rendition on the Kineraws - it suits my tastes almost perfectly (the dynamic range ain't top but I can live with that no problemo).. but who knows how the 4K BMCC will look like. Keeping my fingers crossed it will be better than the Kineraw cam.

[quote name='kirk' timestamp='1347901134' post='18372']
8% usable shots from the GH2? Sounds like you have a lot to learn :P
[/quote]

I think I wrote "perfect image". Sounds like you have trouble with semantics.

[quote name='EOSHD' timestamp='1347796538' post='18237']
Yes cinema Pierre, like that screened at the Skywalker Ranch for Coppola.

You don't know it doesn't have a flat profile yet.

You don't know if it looks better than the GH2 yet because you're judging massively compressed web footage at 7Mbit - not ALL-I 72mbit 1080p.

Muppet post of the year?
[/quote]

72mbit will magically change the "panny" colors and noticeably widen the dynamic range??? Aaw c'mon.... but hey... I didn't say this footage or the camera is shit.

I had the GH2 as a toy for a year and in about 8% situations it produced something I would call a perfect image. But those other 92% frustrated the hell out of me and post production could never save it. The "Zacuto GH2" incident just fits in those 8% btw.

A "cinema" camera performs great at least in 70% of situations.

Oh and yeah.. again.. no logs and flats.

Cinema? With this camera?? It doesn't even have a "flat" profile and the typical panasonic colors need heavy heavy post processing to look better. Other than that the new codec looks very good and overall it's much better than GH2. But the footage looks marginally different to GH1 & GH2.

Not sure why people are intimidated by the RAW. It's just easier and faster to grade in the proper software (Resolve runs smoothly on my not so beefy computer) - you just need a proper gfx card. I just hope Adobe Premiere will hopefully catch up soon to their own DNG format.

Also after your project is done just batch convert the archived files to Cineform RAW and you've saved some space. Easy peasy...

Raw gives you extra latitude but it doesn't save your images if you can't shoot worth a damn.

And this is what we've been waiting for. Finally it's going to be all about the talent and not the tech features because they will be on a super usable level as a default - no more tech crippling. Sort of like the analog era - the film was a superb sensor.

To the 5D Mark III trolls :) Listen...the DSLR look is dead. Even Act of Valor was pushed hard not to look like your average DSLR shiznit - and that's something that 95% of DSLR users are not capable of because their grading skills suck. DSLR dynamic range without a massive help of lighting tricks is just weird and unnatural looking for motion picture. If you really dig it you've got some really freaky taste.

Oh and bohoo... BMC can't do still photos? Well lol.. buy BMC, buy Canon lenses and buy a used 550d body for a few dimes - its performance in still raw is very very usable even when compared with Mark III.

Andrew, great job trying to stay objective with these articles on real video cameras VS still cameras. Don't be distracted by people who can't tell a turd from a lion chocolate bar ;)

Haha! What the hell is wrong with me. I'm having more fun with the raw samples off of Kineraw website than the ones from BMC.

Ah c'mon people. The relatively short DSLR era for shooting real good video is slowly ending. Finally again the video cameras will be for shooting videos and still cameras (DSLR's) for taking stills. It's just way too problematic to cross these two things into one without problems.

Long live the BMC, Kineraw and Bolex*! Thanks for freeing us from the goddamn DSLR's. Finally :)

And Canon producing a similar camera some day? Well yes of course.. the technology progresses, cpus get more powerfull, displays getting more hires and of course the sensors get more DR, resolution and less noise as the time goes on. You would be retarded not to have a 4k raw video even on a compact digital camera one day with so much powerful hardware being available from so many companies for a dime.

But Canon successfully attacking the cheap cinema camera market at this moment?? Naaah.. what bothers me is most that the C300 is cool but it still has the "canon" colors and not enough DR. It's the taste of the "color science" department in that company that makes me feel uneasy during editing. Same goes to Panasonic and Sony. It's no wonder the big guys go to Alexa or Red - those cameras have a specific more neutral "taste" (ok there was a change with Epic for Red) which even the old school guys like. It will take some time until the other big companies will understand this that they have to provide a more neutral look without them putting too much of their own juices into it.