tupp

Alexa>anything else 

aside from Film of course. Its super odd to me that no one has been able to match the Alexa since the classic came out 10 years ago. I guess 10 years isn't a long time. 

LOL!
 
Well, I think that some of the images that I linked were actually shot on Ektachrome and Kodacolor, but I mostly gave Kodachrome examples, as it is the "extreme" of the color emulsions.
 
Also, I said early in the thread that color depth was probably the key variable for digital "thickness,"  so I agree that "dense" digital images can be (and have been) achieved with digital cameras.
 
 
Both trailers look good, but the Red footage looks thin/brittle compared to that of the Alexa footage.  Of course, much of these looks could result from the grade.

eh I think I'll just wait for Tupp to show up and say that it cannot have a dense image as long as it wasn't shot on Kodachrome(tm), seeing how that has been this thread for the last month or so.

Need desktop Ryzen to edit HEVC 4:2:2 smooth, 5950x can handle 3 stream of h.265 4k60p real time smooth, but then no laptop have the power of that.
 
I m curious to see the difference between 8gb and 16gb for a bit bigger projects.

Thermal throttle is no fun though, unless you edit super fast

The current videos out so far is only doing simple layer edit, once you put multiple layer/lut etc the throttle will be more obvious

Yeah and losses to 1400€ ryzen laptop. By a lot. Loses even for the cheap ryzen 4600U.

Ha, ha!  Great performances!
 
What is the "12-step program" for B-roll addicts?

Its funny because its true.
 
B roll on youtube has become the tail wagging the dog. 
 
Solid acting on that piece by the way.

I'm here if you need to talk.
 
 

Yes, but it is less light on a proportionally smaller area.
 
So, cropping-in on an image circle doesn't change the exposure.

Yes, but it is less light on a proportionally smaller area.
 
So, cropping-in on an image circle doesn't change the exposure.

Sony has an excellent 16-55 2.8 for E-mount.
 
It will look completely the same, but you WILL get a stop better lowlight performance. Sensor crop DOES NOT effect the light level hitting the sensor. 
 
Don't think these really show how highlights behave, it's clearly a overcast day. 

@hyalinejimI don't disagree with anything you said. But I do think that the difference between the two images you posted is very subtle to the point that without flipping back and forth, neither one would really stand out as "thicker". That's why I'm saying thickness is mostly (not entirely, but mostly) about the colors in the scene, as well as of course exposure and white balance. There's a definite improvement between the pics, but I don't think that it makes or breaks the image.
On the other hand I think the colors in my phone pics went from being stomach-turningly terrible to halfway decent with just a little water.
Another way to put it, is I don't think you'd get a significantly thicker image out of any two decent digital/film cameras given the same scene and sensible settings. You can definitely eke small gains out with subtle color adjustment, and I agree with your analysis of what makes it better, I just don't see that as the primary element.

And I think this is one of the ingredients in "image thickness"... but probably not the only one. Anyway, a very interesting discussion with some great examples and a lot to think about here.
Another difference I've noticed between film and digital (photos) is that the contrast curve tends to be different. Film has more contrast in the shadows and less in the highlights compared to digital. This makes sense when you consider that film has about four stops under middle grey when shot at box speed, and many more above. For digital it's the opposite: about four stops above middle grey (it varies with camera and with profile, there will be more with log) and many more below.
So the film print curve is pushing down those low contrast shadows in the toe of the negative to actually make them black, but the highlight curve is much more restrained so that it can hold onto those 10+ stops that reach up into the shoulder (when shooting Vision3 negative film or Portra 400 or Fuji 400H.... you wouldn't get as much highlight headroom with other film stocks).
Finally, that blocking up of the shadows that you get when film is exposed at box speed or slightly underexposed is actually a very useful visual tool because it focuses the eye on the midtones and highlights.

The situation with film is complex, as so many things in life are. From my tests, the midtones of a scene shot on negative film are most saturated when exposed at +1 or +2 above box speed, and then brought within range when scanning. Nevertheless and regardless of under or overexposure, a comparison of the same scene shot on film and digital will show that the film has more saturated shadows and more desaturated highlights than the digital, when the contrast of the digital is made to match the film scan and when the global saturation of the digital is altered so that midtone saturation matches. Phew, that was a mouthful!
I think what Art Adams was referring to in his article that mentions desaturated shadows on film is with regard to a print film emulation lut. I could be wrong but he seems to be referring to the fashion for lifted and desaturated shadows that seeks to emulate the toe of film.

You can see that effect clearly here. This is Fuji 400H exposed at box speed:
And this is the same chart exposed at -2 but scanned to bring up the midtones. Note how the shadows are lifted, because the shadow areas of the chart are now very close to the base fog of the emulsion, and are hardly registering at all:

Yes, it's a less saturated image than the correctly exposed one. But if you took a digital shot of the same chart at the same exposure level, applied a curve to match the contrast and altered saturation so that the midtones match.... I think you'd still see the same pattern of more saturation in the shadows for film, and less in the highlights.
So yes, there is a kind of saturation curve for film: as you increase stops of exposure, saturation increases up to the midtones and then starts to decrease. BUT (!) at each exposure level when proper contrast is applied (either by printing onto paper, projecting onto a screen through transparency, or applying a gamma curve when scanning) the shadows end up more saturated and the highlights less than you would find in a digital file given the same treatment.
Now, I'm not exactly sure why that is. It sounds logically impossible, but I've seen the proof of it countless times. Note, I'm basing my observations on scans of negative film from a Noritsu minilab scanner. This is not the same process as negative to print film in the motion picture industry. It might be that the Noritsu is controlling saturation in this way. However, if it is then it's doing so to emulate the behaviour of a darkroom print.
Yes, you and @KnightsFan have shown some great examples of this. However, aside from concerns with exposure, lighting, whether the scene is wet or dry etc., it seems to be the case that two cameras can shoot the same scene and be given the same post treatment, yet one camera will yield a "thick" image and the other will yield a "thin" image.
What causes it? I think it's the saturation response across the tonal range. Digital images look thin because of the way they (probably accurately) capture saturation from shadows to midtones to highlights. If you want your image to look thicker you need to boost shadows and decrease highlight saturation. But you need enough colour information in the file to do that.

In terms of visual post effects that can effect the image. "Sharpen & Soften" effect in Resolve and a slight drop in exposure.

 
 

Quick demo of the effect of water on image thickness. Just two pics from my (low end) phone cropped and scaled for manageable size. These may be the worst pictures in existence, but I think that simply adding water, thereby increasing specularity, contrast, and color saturation makes a drastic increase in thickness. Same settings, taken about 5 seconds apart.

 

sup density u lookin thick in that mask today
 
lots of great stuff to read in this thread
fwiw: to me a 'thick' image is
1. a well exposed piece of film where you can pull value by dodging and burning in the darkroom
2. in contemporary speak, the same thing. just using computers
i feel like its a colloquial term lol

But it does 😄 No matter what camera do you use, 24-105 f/4 can transfer only a certain amount of light. Crop sensor collects light from a smaller area = less light collected compared to FF camera with the same lens. The speedbooster can only compensate that by focusing all of the light from the lens onto the smaller sensor area.
 
So 24-105 f/4 with a speed-booster will look just as it looks on full frame.

Although we disagree on the "less than 8-bit" images, I have been waiting for someone to mention that we are viewing film emulsion images through 8-bit files.
 
To the eye, the color depth of Kodachrome is considerably more vast than what is shown in these 8-bit images.  Kodachrome was one of the rare film processes that added dye to the emulsion during processing, which gave it such deep colors (and which is also more archival).  Some of that splendor is captured in these 8-bit scans, so, theoretically, there should be a way to duplicate those captured colors shooting digitally and outputting to 8-bit. 
 
 
 
You probably would see the variation in the skin tones if you were there, but, to one's eyes, such variations don't seem so dramatic.  Furthermore, Kodachrome usually looked snappier than other reversal films (when normally processed), but when directly viewing a Kodachrome slide, it won't look as contrasty as the 8-bit scans we see in this thread.
Of course, the baby's face (and the parents' faces) is brighter on the front, because of the lighting angle.  If the baby has been sunbathing for hours, then the father is crispier than George Hamilton.

No, no makeup team for me!
The people i'm filming have much more variability - more like in this image:

That's also a useful image for testing LUTs and seeing what they do to skintones BTW.
Nice looking images.  The DB certainly had a cult following.
Interesting.  There were also some great sample shots from the UMP with skintones, I should look through them for good examples.
I agree that thickness can happen with low and high key images, with saturated and not so saturated images too.  
A few things keep coming up, and I think i'm starting to fit a few of them together.
One is the ability to render subtle variations in tone, and yet, we're looking at all these test images in 8-bit, and some in less than 8-bit, yet this doesn't seem to be a limiting factor.
I wonder if maybe we're thinking about colour subtlety and DR and bit-depth the wrong way.  I mean literally, that we think we want more of these things, but that actually maybe we want less.
Take this image for example:

This image is contrasty and saturated.  In fact, it's very contrasty.  If you were looking at this scene in real life, these people wouldn't have so much variation in luminance and saturation in their skintones - that baby would have to have been sunbathing for hours but only on the sides of his face and not on the front.
In that sense, film and its high contrast is actually expanding and amplifying subtle luma differences, and when we increase contrast we increase saturation too, so it's amplifying those subtle hue variations.
One thing i've noticed about film vs digital in skintones is that digital seems to render people's skintones either on the yellow-side, on the pink-side, or in the middle and not that saturated.  Film will show people with all those tones all at once.  
This guy is another example of a decent variation of hues in his skin:

To me, the "thickness" of a film image is revealed by a rich, complex color(s).  That color is not necessarily saturated nor dark.
 
That "thickness" of film emulsion has nothing to do with lighting nor with what is showing in the image.  Certainly, for the thickness to be revealed, there has to be some object in the frame that reflects a complex color.  An image of a white wall will not fully utilize the color depth of an imaging system.  However, a small, single color swatch within a mostly neutral image can certainly demonstrate "thickness."
 
I don't think that's how it works.  Of course, there is also reversal film.
 
 
Agreed.  Digital tends to make skin tones mushy (plastic?) compared to film.
Look at the complex skin tones in some of these Kodachrome images.  There is a lot going on in those skin tones that would be lost with most digital cameras.  In addition, observe the richness and complexity of the colors on the inanimate objects.
 
 
Yes.  Please note that most of the images in the above linked gallery are brightly lit and/or shot during broad daylight.
 
 
Agreed.  I think that the quality that you seek is inherent in film emulsion, and that quality exists regardless of lighting and regardless of the overall brightness/darkness of an image.
 
 
Because of the extensive color depth and the distinctive color rendering of normal film emulsion, variations in tone are often more apparent with film.  Not sure if that should be considered to be more of a gradual transition in chroma/luma or to be just higher "color resolution."
 
 
Those images are nice, but they seem thinner than the Kodachrome images in the linked gallery above.
 
 
The image is nicely crafted, but I read that it was shot on Fuji Eterna stock.  Nevertheless, to me its colors look "thinner" than those shown in this in this Kodachrome gallery.
 
 
Great site!  Thanks for the link!
 
 
I disagree.  I think that the "thickness" of film is inherent in how emulsion renders color.
 
 
The cross-lighting in that "Grandmaster" image seems hard and contrasty to me (which can reveal texture more readily than a softer source).  I don't see many smooth gradations/chirascuro.
 
 
Evidently, OP seeks the "thickness" that is inherent in film emulsion, regardless of lighting and contrast.
 
 
Nice shots!
Images from CCD cameras such as the Digital Bolex generally seem to have "thicker" color than their CMOS counterparts.
However, even CCD cameras don't seem to have the same level of thickness as many film emulsions.
 
 
That certainly is a pretty image.
Keep in mind that higher resolution begets more color depth in an image.  Furthermore, if your image was shot with Blackmagic Ursa Min 12K, that sensor is supposedly RGBW (with perhaps a little too much "W"), which probably yields nicer colors.

I think the light and amount of contrast of the scene makes a huge difference to the image thickness.  When you have a good amount of contrast in your scene with areas of shadow and bright highlights, and your object is well exposed then you can bring the blacks down were they belong and help with the perceived thickness (and also reduce the perceived grain/noise).  Were I notice the main difference with cameras that produce thicker images like the digital Bolex is with skin tones and also foliage/leaves/trees etc.  Whether it's the tonality/colour gamut/saturation/shadow saturation or all of these when combined with good light they just look more alive. Here is a screen shot from the D16 (not mine) which while compressed to heck look 'thick' and alive to me.
 
 
 
 

A lot of our examples have been soft, vintage, or film. I just watched the 12k sample footage from the other thread and I think that it displays thick colors despite being an ultra sharp digital capture. So I don't think that softening optics or post processing is a necessity.