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kye reacted to fuzzynormal in The Aesthetic Part 3 - Film as the new reference
Well, I appreciate the mental exercises you're putting yourself through. The questions are interesting. Still, at the end of the day everyone's process is a bit different. Since arts and crafts are subjective, quantifying how those two things merge is only useful up to a point, imo. And, of course, that point is usually wildly different for all of us doing this stuff.
I'd ask, do you really wanna chase what that means? It might always be ephemeral as context changes; slipping out of reach. And shouldn't such meaning remain in the realm of intuition anyway?
Then again, maybe not. At least not for everybody.
Perhaps being in a space without firm answers isn't interesting to you? Maybe striving for technical contentment at the limits of understanding is the thing you enjoy. That's cool too. Engineering can be artful in it's own way as well.
Either way, keep poking around.
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kye reacted to fuzzynormal in The Aesthetic Part 3 - Film as the new reference
Good write up!
I've run the gauntlet as well. My conclusion is that what you wrote above is the thing that'll get me through, so I accept it. And why not?
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kye got a reaction from Emanuel in The Aesthetic Part 3 - Film as the new reference
For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference. There are no numbers to look up and understand things from.
It applies to the equipment:
Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available). Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time.
If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc.
If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image. It's literally what they're designed to do. How much do they do this though? Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc.
It applies to the look we're creating:
Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution". How much is desired? What are the references?
I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including:
My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4. How soft is it though? Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want! I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things. Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help.
My solution is to reference things back to film.
I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film.
This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful. 8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema.
My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways...
Texture, which is what I've talked about so far:
- I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between)
- I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference. These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related.
Dynamic Range and Contrast:
- How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process?
- What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s? or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period?
Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets.
Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution. When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense.
What else?
Image stability is another one. 8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look. Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others.
Depth of field is another one. Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand.
There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me.
The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in.
Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like:
The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm. I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe. The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens. Any other combo doesn't make sense.
(This is an actual example I've worked out through testing).
The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments. This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes.
(This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work)
iPhone? Where does it sit in all this? It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance.
GH7. What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting). What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic. I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.
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kye got a reaction from TrueIndigo in The Aesthetic Part 3 - Film as the new reference
For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference. There are no numbers to look up and understand things from.
It applies to the equipment:
Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available). Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time.
If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc.
If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image. It's literally what they're designed to do. How much do they do this though? Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc.
It applies to the look we're creating:
Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution". How much is desired? What are the references?
I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including:
My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4. How soft is it though? Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want! I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things. Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help.
My solution is to reference things back to film.
I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film.
This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful. 8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema.
My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways...
Texture, which is what I've talked about so far:
- I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between)
- I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference. These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related.
Dynamic Range and Contrast:
- How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process?
- What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s? or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period?
Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets.
Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution. When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense.
What else?
Image stability is another one. 8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look. Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others.
Depth of field is another one. Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand.
There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me.
The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in.
Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like:
The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm. I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe. The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens. Any other combo doesn't make sense.
(This is an actual example I've worked out through testing).
The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments. This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes.
(This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work)
iPhone? Where does it sit in all this? It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance.
GH7. What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting). What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic. I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.
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kye reacted to eatstoomuchjam in New cinema camera...?
This is why, for me, there are two likely ways to use it:
1) My small bag full of C-mount and D-mount lenses and possibly attach it to the smallest 5" monitor that I have (which is quite small)
2) Throw it in my bag where it takes up almost no space and attach it to the back of existing short telephoto lenses which now function like long telephoto lenses
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kye got a reaction from Emanuel in New cinema camera...?
There's a realisation I keep hitting in my setups, despite me trying to keep a small kit. It goes like this:
Start with a small camera body Think about the lenses I'd use with it for that project Think about the shooting style and approach and think about extra rigging and accessories that would require
----<realisation occurs>---- If the setup is going to be that big - why not use a larger body with better features / quality I'm having that realisation with this GoPro.
Not that there's a ton of small bodies with 10-bit recording, which we've all complained about at great length, but just having a camera body with more than 3 buttons and a screen that is larger than a postage stamp etc is actually quite useful.
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kye reacted to youshouldtry11 in Filming with an uncoated lens made in the 1930s
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kye got a reaction from maxJ4380 in New cinema camera...?
Getting good affordable 960p would be cool for lots of people. I see the science explainer channels showing bad quality 960p and the richer channels with Chronos setups.
Don't get me wrong about them not being cameras that appeal to a large number of people. They're very good for getting the new "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME AND WIDE AND SMOOTH AND DEFINITELY SHARP SHARP SHARP!!!!" style of video that looks more like video than anything ever made before, but as soon as they say it's a cinema camera, there are 27 things they have to change from every other model ever made, and to bet they'll get every single one of them right is a very long shot indeed.
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kye reacted to Emanuel in Undone is done
Matt, that half-cropped head makes it even funnier.
@kye great post! ; )
:- )
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kye reacted to fuzzynormal in Undone is done
There's a colleague in my town that is trying to make "animation" films with 100% generative A.I. What would Francis conclude about someone working without 'hands' and 'head'? Or at best, no hands and half their head.
Like Gerald, this colleague is hoping he's able to maintain a financially rewarding YouTube channel.
It could be that he is jumping on the slop-train. But, on the other hand, at least he's making a novel effort production-wise to try and pay his bills.
Whereas, my naive thinking is that there's still a chance my documentaries will be, somehow, someway, financially rewarding. And, even though that's unlikely, making docs is at least creatively fulfilling.
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kye reacted to ND64 in Undone is done
When I was learning calligraphy, an Arabic one, wich is very hard to learn and needs a specialized pen, my mentor used to say to us "an artist can write perfectly even with matchsticks, don't be obsessed with pens". Later on I realized he has an expensive collection of pens, from cheap ones to exotic ones, old and new, and in all possible sizes. He wasn't obsessed with gear. You could give him a philips screwdriver and leftover construction paint and he could manage to write a poem with that on a wooden pallet. But he also had a passion for gears, because pen is something that connects him to the art he loves.
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kye got a reaction from Emanuel in Undone is done
I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective.
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
- Saint Francis of Assisi
I'm 100% for not gatekeeping. Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.
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kye got a reaction from Andrew - EOSHD in Undone is done
I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective.
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
- Saint Francis of Assisi
I'm 100% for not gatekeeping. Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.
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kye got a reaction from Emanuel in New cinema camera...?
Luc Forsyth likes it, or what he saw at NAB anyway.
This is a setup they had with a broadcast servo-zoom lens on it.
His comments (link with timestamp)
He's worked on the survival show Alone for a few seasons and they use dozens of GoPros, but the footage always looks like it came from a GoPro This new model with a proper lens attached looked like footage from a real camera The broadcast zoom setup (with a phone as a monitor) handled like a proper camera He doesn't use AF when rigging cameras to vehicles etc most of the time so the lack of AF doesn't bother him in that context -
kye got a reaction from newfoundmass in Undone is done
I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective.
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
- Saint Francis of Assisi
I'm 100% for not gatekeeping. Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.
-
kye got a reaction from eatstoomuchjam in New cinema camera...?
Luc Forsyth likes it, or what he saw at NAB anyway.
This is a setup they had with a broadcast servo-zoom lens on it.
His comments (link with timestamp)
He's worked on the survival show Alone for a few seasons and they use dozens of GoPros, but the footage always looks like it came from a GoPro This new model with a proper lens attached looked like footage from a real camera The broadcast zoom setup (with a phone as a monitor) handled like a proper camera He doesn't use AF when rigging cameras to vehicles etc most of the time so the lack of AF doesn't bother him in that context -
kye reacted to newfoundmass in Undone is done
Mosts artists create and never share their work with people outside of their immediate friends and family. Others create and share it on the micro level, simply wishing to share it but not make a big thing of it (example: folks that play at the local bar but have no interest in recording and releasing music.)
I think as a whole we are far too judgmental about art and the things people create. It's okay to be critical, but at the end of the day, we should encourage people who create anything at all, especially as AI creeps into the picture. People don't just use AI for the convenience, but because of their own insecurities. I know too many local businesses who have started using AI because of the belief that it looks better than what they were creating themselves. I'm certainly guilty of thinking to myself, when looking at something a local business owner clearly made themselves, "that's awful." What I wouldn't do though to go back to seeing that stuff over the soulless, gross AI slop that they are all switching to. At least it had personality and you knew someone put their time and effort into creating it, even if it wasn't great.
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kye reacted to Aussie Ash in Undone is done
some people can't understand why some oil painters have no interest in selling their paintings ,the satisfaction is in the pleasure of creating the painting ,and even sometimes it may be better than the last one.
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kye got a reaction from mercer in Resolve 21
It's an interesting update for sure.
While I find the upgrading process to be too much of a PITA to upgrade unless there's a killer feature in the next version I really want to use, there are a few things in there that are interesting from an AI perspective.
The first is the AI Face tools, with AI Face Reshaper & AI Face Age Transformer. This is interesting because it shows their ability to track and understand faces is vastly improved from the previous generation of Face Refinement tool, which was obviously designed to have very soft masks because their tracking wasn't that great.
I did an excellent course in Beauty Retouching which used Resolve and basically you apply different treatments to each area of the face as each has a different tone/colour/texture and you had to mask each one manually yourself. The ultimate would be for the AI face tools to detect the face and output a mask for each area of the face, automating the masking/tracking.
The second is the Adjust Focus with AI CineFocus, which simulates a shallower DOF, and is a combination of a blur plugin with their depth map plugin. When the depth map plugin came out I tried it on some deep DOF shots to see how it did, and the results were worse than the iPhone 'cinematic mode' with the edges being a very obvious blurry transition, and you couldn't apply anything more than a barely perceptible blur before the edges ruined the shot.
The fact this is now an integrated plugin means it's gotten better to the point they're willing to put it forward for this application. It's probably still a long way from blurring the background but keeping each hair on the subject in-focus, but it shows increased confidence.
I know they are also doing tonnes of little things in the background too. I went through a phase of posting to the BM forums and suggesting features as I came upon things that annoyed me, and to my amusement I had professional colourists (including from Company3) reply and say they've been suggesting the same improvements to BM for year after year, and I notice that a number of these have gotten fixed in the last few versions.
Still, there are gaps in the things I'd really like. One is the stabilisation, which can't handle any kind of shot that isn't perfectly rectilinear, and has no support for removing rolling shutter etc. This is possible, and I went down a deep dive at one point some years ago looking for a solution and there was a product that did it flawlessly, but the product was in the thousands-of-dollars price range so wasn't worth it for me.
The stabilisation also lacks the ability to stabilise the tilt/pan/roll/zoom in different amounts. If I shoot with the BMMCC and an OIS lens for example, the lens stabilises the tilt/pan quite well but has zero roll stabilisation. I'd like to stabilise the roll almost to 100% to keep it almost perfectly fixed, while also stabilising the tilt/pan maybe 40% just to smooth off the rough edges. This isn't possible, except if I build something in Fusion, which apart from forcing me to learn Fusion, also requires I go into the Fusion window to track the shots as well, I can't build a custom OFX and then apply it in the Edit or Colour page.
I don't know why BM didn't just make the stabilisation occur in a node, that way you could just apply it several times however you wanted, but it's a 'special' thing that happens once in the image pipeline, and once only.
My biggest wish for Resolve 22 is lens emulation. Like the Face and CineFocus tools, the lens emulation ingredients are all there if you combine them yourself manually, but integrating them into one plugin would be pretty sweet!
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kye reacted to Phil A in Thinking about getting into a new system
Luckily photography/videography are my hobby so my decisions don't need to make any sense... so I just bought a new-in-box Nikon ZR & a 40mm f/2, both for 30% off. Same store had a Megadap ETZ21 Pro for half price.
So far having a blast with the camera.. I like the form factor a lot and the screen is just exciting, both the IBIS & AF are easily better than my Fujifilm X-H2s. The H.265 is definitely subpar, but it's still ok for social media use because once it's 1080p on a phone, anything will look good.
You should buy things the way they are now, but I sure am hoping they'll bring a firmware update to bring the H.265 to the same level as in the Z6III.
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kye reacted to fuzzynormal in ARRI sold to the Riedel Group
Sure, I'll give you a deep dive. I'll also vent a little. You might imagine there would be some worry matching footage, but for this project, surprisingly not really much of a big deal. We had worked with the Alexa footage for months, so I didn't fret at all that a GH5 would do the pick ups.
Why?
None of the Alexa footage was shot with a deep consideration for the lighting. It was all very workman-like. And the "eye" of the shooter was decent, but average. That's really the biggest thing.
Anyway, the cinematographer and director decided to bring a rigged out Alexa to a run-and-gun-available-light shoot. The dudes are older gents and they just felt like "the best" camera was the logical tool to use. Not true, honestly, but you couldn't convince the cinematographer of that notion. Which is kind of a legacy mentality with older guys, but that's what happened.
There was a political element here too. It's a decent budgeted doc so the "shot on ARRI" rhetoric was desired.
Okay, so the main reason re-shoots were required: there weren't a lot of compelling shots that could juice the narrative. The footage was decent to look at, but not dynamic. The cinematographer really couldn't get around easy with this big 'ol rig and sticks. Interesting things would happen situationally with the characters, but he would unfortunately deliver a single shot when dozens were needed for a good edit. He'd just end up being burned out physically as the day went along and couldn't move into interesting places for useful footage.
Ultimately, a big powerful camera was being underutilized because of "reasons". An Alexa camera delivers nice footage, of course, but when you're pointing it into blown out skies and shooting mid-day with it on the regular, it's not like it'll give you miraculous results.
Here's the other rub that had me slapping my forehead, the cinematographer and the director really like the crushed blacks sort of color grade. And they didn't mind the whites being blown, so... That's a style that was typical a few decades ago, right? Well, you're taking a 14 stop Alexa, throwing away a ton of information, and delivering 9 stops for the final project? That's certainly a look. And Michael Mann loves it as well. But then, why the hell spend the $$ on an Alexa in the first place?
Now, in this story you're getting a bunch of bias from a guy that spent my entire career as a one-man-band. If my background was from the more collaborative perspective of traditional filmmaking, I suppose a lot of this wouldn't even stick in my craw. Don't discount my naivete'.
As for lenses, the cinematographer was using a very clinical variable. Ziess cinema Zoom 28 - 80 mm. And he liked f5.6. Great lens, but neutral character to it with how it was used, so when we went out for more footage I slapped my Olympus 12-40 on my GH5, packed a few ND's, and went with that.
At the end of the day, it turned into an effective modest film. Could have been better, wasn't a disaster. imo, it was too verbose and that ends up being a slog, but all that talky stuff appeals to people that vibe on the themes of the film. And while the film doesn't stretch to get beyond that sort of thing, the director is happy with it, so all's well that ends well.
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kye reacted to BTM_Pix in Thinking about getting into a new system
Well I came, I saw. I chickened out.
Bought a secondhand ZFc with a kit lens.
Effectively, I confidently walked in to get the 64 Strat in classic white with triple single coil pickups and a whammy bar…and walked out with a banjo.
Went from getting a forever camera to getting a foralittlewhile camera.
I had an FM2 when I was a kid and this drew me in as did the £450 price.
The Z8 will have to wait but…
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kye reacted to fuzzynormal in ARRI sold to the Riedel Group
Here's an anecdote regarding our level:
A-Cam was an Alexa Mini on a documentary shoot. The cinematographer didn't really get enough variety for the storytelling the director wanted. We tried to make it work in the edit booth. Couldn't do it. Late in the edit/production when the budget had been burned, the two of us went back into the field to get necessary pick-ups. Those pick ups ended up covering close to 1/3rd of the film. All the footage was cut together, color graded, and released on one of the major American TV networks. Every shot looks cohesive.
That pickup stuff was done with my used, ebay purchased, 9 year old GH5.
And there ain't no way anyone watching that film could readily tell the difference between the two.
That said, anybody got one of those Alexa-Minis laying around they want to give me? I'll trade you my GH5.
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kye reacted to Emanuel in Resolve 21
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20260414-01
In Portuguese.
In conclusion, now in English:
The big leap in Resolve 21 is this: it is no longer just an editor and colour-grading system for video. It now also includes a new Photo page, designed for still photography, with album management, node-based grading, crop and reframe at original resolution, tethered capture with Sony and Canon cameras, support for LUTs and Resolve FX, and collaboration through Blackmagic Cloud.
On the AI side, the package has become much more aggressive. It now includes IntelliSearch to find people, objects, and even words spoken in dialogue, a voice generator from text, CineFocus to recreate depth of field, Face Age Transformer, Face Reshaper, skin-imperfection removal, automatic slate reading with AI Slate ID, UltraSharpen, and Motion Deblur.
In the Cut and Edit pages, the most visible additions are improvements to keyframes and curves, the ability to adjust Fusion effects directly inside those editors, native support for HTML and Lottie graphics, improvements to Text+ and MultiText, and more practical smart bins for filtering footage in the Media Pool.
In colour, VFX, and audio, Resolve 21 adds MultiMaster Trim Manager to generate HDR and SDR versions from the same timeline, Magic Mask render in place, list and layer views in the node editor, and group versions for grades. Fusion gains the Krokodove library, improvements to the macro editor, and an updated USD toolset. Fairlight adds track folders, 6-band clip EQ, EQ and Level Matcher, and Chain FX.
For creators and modern workflows, there are ready-made square and vertical resolutions for social media, direct upload to YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, and X, support for IntelliScript with Final Draft, import of ATEM Mini ISO projects, and major reinforcement of immersive workflows, including VR180 and VR360, Panomap, ILPD retargeting, MainConcept H.265/MV-HEVC, and foveated rendering for Apple Immersive.
In short, Resolve 21 seems to be three things at once: more useful AI, tighter integration between areas that used to be separate, and a much broader opening toward photography, creators, and immersive content. Blackmagic itself presents this version as a major update, with the new Photo page, dozens of new features, and many usability improvements.
This is no small improvement. And who said they were focused only on the SMPTE crowd?! ; ) LOL
Amazing upgrade, kudos to them! : -)
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