racer5

Blackhat means malicious intent, and that sure isn't ML. Otherwise cool news if true.

Question for the Cinelux experts: I've recently come across a 2x MC. It's the model with lips, focus knob and lock. The optics looks good, but the focus knob will barely rotate, and I'm unable to get the front  element to budge at all. I fully loosened the lock knob before trying this. Is there anything that can be done here? If only it were stuck at infinity instead of 3 meters!

Yeah dude, your still driftin'.

Hopefully the firmware update patches this.

Ya I agree there's something unique about the look. But I guess the point I'm making is that it's a bit of a misconception that the camera is destroying all information in the lower end. Again looking at the man from the top picture, he's exposed many many stops under without any fill and appears solid black. But if we view the raw clip with slightly reduced contrast those blacks have info. This is a blow-up of that:

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And this of course is using a non-flat punchy profile.

Ebrahim, below are two snaps of an un-transcoded h265 NX1 clip opened in VLC.  The clip was exposed for the window, putting the foreground in silhouette. 

The first snap is straight off the card, the second is with an interactive contrast reduction in VLC. If you look at the man's hair or the people to the right in the second snap, there is information hiding in the shadows of this tiny 4K clip.

I for one will NOT be returning the NX1. I like the colors and resolution way too much. Tried an A7S as a stills hybrid and I really hate how that camera feels in the hand; it was a dealbreaker for me. In terms of dynamic range: this is not a camera to shoot flat and fiddle with. It gives you a nice film-curvy look out of the box. After you grade SLog the blacks will be crushed anyway, and the colors are probably not going to be as spot on.

​I've tried putting old Pentax lenses on and get the same results. I don't think its lens related. Easiest way to test this is point at a window and overexpose until zebras are filling the frame. Go into movie preview mode. Whip down to the floor. What I'm seeing is that the floor "settles" into a darker exposure over the course of some frames. 

​1: Ah, I missed that in the manual. Still seems to be related; everything is set to manual but "something" is changing exposure. 

2: Originally thought that it was just a light measurement too, but on page 55 of the manual they call that the "exposure adjustment value".

Thanks for the tip of iFFMPEG Andrew, may give it a try.

But is no one else using Hybrid? Works great natively on the Mac, it's free, and is positively loaded with features. It has become key to my NX1 workflow.

I've encountered this sporadically as well when panning from a clipped zebra zone - I think it's an exposure compensation bug, and should be an easy firmware fix. Two things I'm curious if others can confirm they also get: 

1: When I start recording my videos fade in ever so slightly.

2: In the status display window on top of the camera the "EV" (exposure adjustment value) bounces around while recording. 

​richg - late reply here as I'm still catching up on this thread, but on the topic of Apocalypse: I started an ASC subscription 20+ years ago, and this subject has come up in the magazine more than once over the years. In fact I've noticed that if you go further back in the archives, the Apocalypse issues tend to sell out, starting with the May 1980 issue (a retrospective of notable films from '79 - I don't think it was featured before that).

While I've also seen reference to Panavision and Todd AO being used on the film, Storaro and the second unit DP have always said they filmed it with Cooke zooms adapted by an Italian company that Storaro had a longstanding relationship with - going back to his relatively low budget work with Bertolucci. The anamorphic adapters they used sat behind the Cooke sphericals. I think a sequence may have been filmed by Coppola in Panavision before Storaro arrived. 

I've been lurking on this thread and am fairly blown away by what you guys are up to here. We seem to be reaching this convergence point between home movies and classic hollywood imagery. These are hobby shots of girlfriends and kids, but they begin to have that heightened magic of cinema. Great stuff. Think I'll be taking the FM plunge soon myself! 

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.

 

Well, without knowing your post workflow it's impossible to say what was going on there. It's easy to mishandle raw footage and get unhappy color accidents, I've certainly done my share of this. But the cameras you mention have been tested in controlled environment shootouts, and while of course they are not Alexas, hold their own pretty good:

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"..

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.

Nice attempt at summary dismissal, but that's a straw-man argument I never made. I simply noted that the clip "looks" bad. To elaborate, I found the clip visually fuzzy, murky, unpleasantly underlit, and filled with electronic noise that does not look like film grain. I'm not commenting on the subject matter, mood, or anything about its "experimental" nature. I wouldn't even classify it as "experimental"--it's a straightforward montage of the sort you see all the time in camera tests on the Interwebs.  

Ok but it's 120fps at 12000 ISO. The look is dreamy and glowy. My cameras can't do that. I for one am excited by the possibilities here, but to each his own I guess.

Yes, I think the critical takeaway from that video is "Don't shoot at high ISOs in slo-mo. It looks terrible."

That's funny, I thought the takeaway was "don't try to make cool experimental imagery if your audience consists of pedantic internet pixel peepers".

I registered an account just to say I'm preparing a project and found this inspirational.

And yeah, I want that camera too.