mtheory

The footage above by no means does the KineMini justice, some of the other stuff I've seen from the earlier cams is incredible. 
 
It's a completely different market to the GH4, A7S... probably why hardly anyone on this forum is interested in it! 
 
The Kinefinity guys are also very forward thinking.. I think they are going to do very well. 
 
I want one. 

Wanted a BMCC update....
 
 
...got the head of 'Dog' from Half Life 2  :o

Looks like Blackmagic brought these guys aboard...
 
 

BMD, never again.

The only thing we can expect from the Canon Cinema line is a price way above what the specs are worth.  C200 - 8 grand, C400 - 15 grand. Awesome. Cannot wait to not buy any of these. 

Remember back in the 1970's when guests on the American TV program "The Tonight Show" would sit at the panel with Johnny Carson while wearing those goofy stripped suits and ties and then end up looking like some kind of visual hypnotizing device?
 
No?
 
Just me?
 
Hey!O!

I know filmconvert is considered a great tool, but it doesn't convert raw. It also doesn't really grade, it just applies some retro look combinations (the science of whose is of no importance to any *film* produced within the last decade), and imho it takes you on a meander away from actually developing grading skills. Like it or not, Resolve is a hundred times as powerful, as are the tools in After Effects alone, only that they are not specifically dedicated to grading. 

Let's not forget that James is a master grader who made 5D H264 footage look incredibly film-like long before RAW showed up, so I suspect the softness and the muted colors in this latest video are very much intentional, and result of his grade.
 
I remember seeing him being dissed around on various forums for his 'aggressive' visual style, so perhaps he decided to scale back in response? I hope it is only temporary, as I very much love his visual approach, which he perfected with Genesis. 
 
As for BM4K, I am still on the original NAB-date pre-order but will reserve my judgement until RAW update comes out.

Let's not forget that James is a master grader who made 5D H264 footage look incredibly film-like long before RAW showed up, so I suspect the softness and the muted colors in this latest video are very much intentional, and result of his grade.
 
I remember seeing him being dissed around on various forums for his 'aggressive' visual style, so perhaps he decided to scale back in response? I hope it is only temporary, as I very much love his visual approach, which he perfected with Genesis. 
 
As for BM4K, I am still on the original NAB-date pre-order but will reserve my judgement until RAW update comes out.

Really didn't think this looked all that great, especially compared to his work here -

Checkmate, Canon.

Checkmate, Canon.

Then:
 
Explain to him how he's wrong about the ugly noise texture in all MX footage, especially tungsten-balanced, making the image look cheap and chunky and digital.
 
Explain to him why the shadows get so chunky and blue in any tungsten-balanced Red scene, whereas Alexas can be shot under any lighting condition. And then go on and add why the Alexa's superior low light ability is irrelevant.
 
Explain to him why it's irrelevant that the Alexa has a smoother noise texture, much more like film.
 
Explain to him why, despite the Red's 13.5 stops of DR being is a total lie (in fact the camera has no more DR than the C300, less than the F5, and a magenta-tinted highlight rolloff), it's still better than the 14.5+ stops smoothly handled in the Alexa.
 
Explain why the Alexa's superior midrange tonality isn't significant.
 
Explain why red code botching details in skin and foliage (again, some of the most emotionally resonant subject matter...) is irrelevant, whereas ArriRAW is fine and even prores handles these details well.
 
Explain to him why the color science of the Alexa matches 5219 almost exactly and offers smooth creamy flesh tones and beautiful green foliage, whereas the red totally botches memory colors, but that's ok.
 
Explain to him how he's wrong that the OLPF of the Red offers ugly internal reflections and color cast over highlights, whereas the Alexa rolls off smoothly like film.
 
I'm curious. Explain how an ugly image with good specs looks better than a beautiful one with somewhat lesser specs.
 
Personally I would shoot a C300 or F5 over an Epic; the Epic has a stranglehold on summer blockbusters for the resolution advantage, but the look is just so... ugly and the workflow so damn shitty.
 
Yes there is beautiful content shot on red. But Prometheus, for instance, required a lot of CGI lipstick to dress up that pig.
 
I do find the character of the Monochrome sensor to be superior.

What BMD REALLY needs is to ship their bloody cameras.  ;)
But I agree. The sensor is the last thing they should be focusing on. How about giving users the ability to... I dunno... review/delete clips? Have a decent battery? Some kind of total runtime countdown? A myriad of basic camera features that any decent company would think to include in a quality assured product. 

I'm surprised at Only God Forgives' ( lack of ) reception in the cinema press too. The silence is deafening...

While the Academy itself is all about politics, which is the only reason I can think of why both Only God Forgives and To the Wonder are missing from Best Cinematography, the Arri cameras are being picked by DPs because that's what they want to shoot on, for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with politics.
 
This is also the first year where a majority of the nominees are digital origination versus film, 3:2 where last year it was 2:3 and the year before it was 2:3 as well (with one RED film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and one mostly film with some RED b-cam, Tree of Life).  A lot of European DPs prefer Arri cameras just in general and then you add to that the Alexa's more immediately pleasing, baseline output which is less dependent on DIT support, post, etc.
 
Let's see what Cronenweth Jr. and Fincher can get in there for next year though.

That's certainly a big reason for why The Hobbit is the biggest offender here.  The faster frame rate, even when down sampled to 24P, retains the crispness of the HFR and therefore high shutter footage.  But other 4K digital acquisition, at 24P, will still have objectionable aesthetics if you compared side-by-side with film of similar scanned resolution.  
 
I'm having a parallel discussion on the subject with some industry colleagues and apparently some vendors actually have been working on the problem and identifying one of the biggest reasons why two images of equal resolution, one film origination and the other digital will almost invariably result in the analog picture being found more pleasing:
 
(* HVS = human visual system)   We're designed to detect patterns and edges and the fixed grid of the sensor is the perfect structure  to draw our attention.  It is also a phenomenon that has both spatial and temporal factors (like the HFR of The Hobbit).  Film resolves higher that digital of supposedly similar resolution when you include how we perceive the analog image over time versus the fixed and never changing grid.  This is something that Aaton (see the pattern here, Arri and now Aaton) is or was working on with the Delta Penelope:
 
 
...this is my first exposure to this project but reportedly they're having problems with the Dalsa sensor.
 
edit: oh, I guess the company is no more.  Hopefully something like this will be along the lines of where Arri goes with new cameras.

And you'd be in the company of a lot of respected DPs that have made the transition to digital.
 
Arri has proven since the introduction of the Alexa that, when it comes to digital, how you fill those rows and columns is ultimately more important than how many rows and columns you're filling.  Higher and higher resolution and more and more DR and wider and wider color gamut are all goals the engineers busy working away at Sony or RED understand.  They're practical problems with practical solutions, overcome by throwing more and faster engineering at them.  These engineers aren't going to create better cameras though.
 
Last night I finally got around to watching Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master and immediately thought about where we were going here.  It's almost poetic that this film was released the same year as the first installment of The Hobbit, a shitty looking 4K movie shot on RED.  I'm not anti-RED and there are plenty of good looking RED films, this isn't one of them and this film is a good example of what's missing from RED (and Sony's) path.
  Reading about their workflow, on The Master, it reinforces my feelings that 4K and beyond, with digital cameras, is really a problem for filmmaking, and it's not just about resolution.  Nobody has ever complained that 65mm made actors or sets or props or make up look bad.  The Master was a mixed 65mm (mostly) and 35mm show, graded photochemically with both print and DCP distribution.  They did four separate release finishes for this film, with true photochemical for 70mm and 35mm prints.  It's crazy.  But for their DI they scanned the 5-perf 65mm at 8K and the 4-perf 35mm at 6K for an eventual 4K DCP finish.   More than once I've read, based on DP and colorist commentary, that anamorphic 35mm with a digital 4K finish is considered minimally what you need if you care about preserving most of what's there in the neg, where 2K is an abomination, but 6K for spherical when you're not shooting 8-perf seems excessive by conventional wisdom.  Everything I've read over the years about how obsessive P.T. Anderson is over the photography of his films leads me to believe they weren't assigning film this level of resolution unless it warranted it.  Every aspect of his acquisition and release methodology was thoroughly tested.  My own experience on dozens and dozens of films working with scanned 35mm imagery concurs.   Making 4K actually look good with digital cameras isn't something that seems part of the conversation at these electronics shows and soft lenses is the current bandaid but I think it's just that.  They're not confronting head on a fundamental flaw in how these sensors are recording reality so discretely and unattractively.  Resolution is to blame but film proves this to be false.   For the 35mm portions of The Master  the emphasis was on the sharpest lenses available, so that the footage cut well with the 65mm.  Meanwhile DP after DP are on record choosing reportedly soft lenses, like Cooke S4,  for high resolution digital acquisition, otherwise finding the look is harsh and unappealing.  Moreover, PT Anderson requires his films be shot on the slowest stocks available, ensuring the smallest possible grain.  DP Mihai Malaimare brought his personal 85mm Zeiss Jena for Panavization, the sharpest 85mm he's ever used or seen, and Panavision found a matching set of expanded focal lengths already in their possession.     All this emphasis on resolution didn't make the film less beautiful.  On the contrary, I can't think of the last time I saw close-ups in a motion picture that inspired this much awe.  It was just astounding.  And the color.  Seeing a film, shot on film, with a photochemical grade that looks this amazing also points out just how over-graded a majority of films are, regardless of the origination.  There's a lot of "just because you can doesn't mean you should" sort of observations one could make.   All the criticisms levied against The Hobbit and DP after DP working around and against the "edge" of Ultra-HD (some of which, yes, is preserved even in 2K or 1080P reductions), this was never the case with film, shooting with what we know to be higher resolving power than 4K.  I think we need to be shifting the conversation away from just the simple number of rows and columns and to how they're being filled.  Video engineers did finally get around to giving us the ability to shoot video with film-like gamma curves, finally appreciating that we don't like our movies looking like the nightly news.  Now they need to appreciate that 4K+ for movies needs to be different than 4K+ for covering Formula-1 or football.

I think this is the best example of where you and I differ in our priorities.  A Red Epic is cheaper than an Alexa Studio and almost 5 times the resolution on paper.  But still, I'd choose an Alexa over the Epic.  

I'm of the belief that if greater image quality than what can be had from true fullhd from the black magic pocket, or hacked canon 5dmk3 is required, then it's time to hire a camera for the job.  The jump in image quality that will be had from anything within reach of consumers is going to be null and void in my opinion.  It would take an expert to tell the difference between a hacked 5dmk3 and an Alexa shooting RGB into an external box.  
 
Focus on glass is priority IMO.  A nice set of Contax Zeiss on a hacked 5dmk3 is gonna literally match or ruin anything else within the budgets of most of us.   Full HD cameras are more than good enough nowadays.

Yep, both 5D3 and 5D2 can do continuous RAW with audio on 1000x cards now. Fucking A.

Yep, both 5D3 and 5D2 can do continuous RAW with audio on 1000x cards now. Fucking A.

Yep, both 5D3 and 5D2 can do continuous RAW with audio on 1000x cards now. Fucking A.

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=7122.900
 
Audio recording while shooting in raw (MLV) has now been enabled by g3ggo. It seems like they are still working out some bugs, but it's good news. It has been out for a few days now, but I have not seen anyone else talking about it so I figured that it warranted its own thread.