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odie

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    Why I am going with 4K and why you should too

    In: Cameras

    Posted

     

    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.

     

    agreed…alexa over red…kodak 35mm overall..

    Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Review - Final Part

    In: Cameras

    Posted

    I had been a projectionist for a long time (now this profession has died), and from 2000 on I had also been a digital projectionist. Until 2011, when automation finally killed the job, I used to compare my own stuff to the DCPs, side by side on the big screens, in the last two years also as DCPs, when easyDCP and openDCP became available. The largest screen was 78 feet x 32 feet (that's for scope, for 16:9 the width then was 58 feet).

     

    First thing I noticed is that resolution doesn't influence sharpness to the expected degree. And it also doesn't influence subjective quality very much. In fact, an upscaled SD DVD ( anamorph pixels with scope-crop, really the worst way to treat a video) could be shown to a big audience, and (back then) nobody complained, the class-A hardware scalers made it look good. I know this is hard to believe, but we once had a festival with student films, ranging from DVD, BD to genuine DCP (a Red!), and the one best looking was a masterfully graded HVX200 short, played from SD DVD.

     

    On the other hand, there was a way to know instantaneously what was film and what was video: Colors. 

     

    I know this comparison is only 8-bit, but I have to find a way to describe aesthetic subtleties here. With a camera like the GH2 ("Musgo"), for example, one would be well advised to fill the frame with detail, textures (resolution, that's the GH2s strength) and not with skies and other big areas of glorious colors.

     

    Right now we grade for 8-bit, so 12-bit raw is *just* a bigger palette for grading. Color depth seems to add a new dimension to our video. It's fun to tear the, er, bloom off the images and to dive through the colors. Would it stand against an Alexa? I can't tell, really, but I'm convinced it would do better than many others.

     

    I can't wait to see a DCP with the 12-bit preserved in my old cinema.

    can you check out the 5d mark lll on the big screen too…?

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