zlfan

nikon photo cameras have that kind of extremely sharp glow, i used v1 10 mp for its 60p mode, coupling with nikon's 18mm f1.8 (?, kind of forgetting the lens spec, long time ago), the video clips on my computer screen are very sharp and has some kind of glow (lost on youtube). now with om1 20mp 120p and zeiss zf 21mm f2.8, i still don't see that kind of sharpness glow. each camera manufacturer has its own secret juice.

This is my point. If a 20 year old varicam 27h can can do a lot that 35mm film rolls can do, the modern crop of mirrorless and cinema cams are much better, the gap between these new ones and the 35mm film rolls is really not that much, hard to justify the 100x cost and the much long time for processing.

seems that baby's chin area, the local dr is really high, yet the highlight rolloff seems nice by my eyes. the details in the highlight area still are kept. there is no clear dead white, no clipping on the right side of the histogram. if this holds true, it is really hard to justify using alexa 35, or even 35mm film rolls. they may be even better in this situation, but 27h is good enough.

i think that baby's face is one of the challengest situations, dark shade, interwoven with the sunshine areas. this demonstrates that the 27h has some mojos. my point is that the film rolls may have similar situation like the closing shop arri, 5% improvement vs 10-20 times cost. for the film rolls, the cost may be 100 times more, depending on the final feature's length.

the highlight rolloff and the skin tones of that baby's face are really nice. the low res look may be due to the superzoom. "I used Angenieux zoom B4 lens, but I'm really interested to trying Zeiss Digiprime, cine lens for 2/3"." my experience on even the canon b4 cinema zoom is not so good. no hands on experience on digiprime. i guess the digiprime will be leading a big margin in terms of clearness.

varicam 27 is 3 2/3 inch ccd cam. so the color is good. not sure about the highlight rolloff. i bought mine 10 years ago, used it once or twice, as i am totally unfamiliar with this format and the learning curve is stiff. those two menus are very difficult to go through. and all those terms in the menus are strange words to me. i am still learning. i can verify the color is good. the resolution and the details are not as good as other high quality 1080p or 4k cams that i have, but because i put an old tv zooms in front of my copy of 27h. if i put some digiprime lens on my unit, and if i learn well to set up my own picture profile confidently, i think the resolution and the details should be acceptable. not sure about the highlight rolloff though. i don't have hands on experience with the alexas and the 35mm film rolls. so i don't know the best highlight rolloff. in normal conditions, seems 27h gives good images.

i want to point out that varicam's 720p is probably the best 720p implemented. the title may be more suitable as "best 720p vs 35mm film rolls in terms of resolution". for the organic feeling, it surprises me that varicam's 720p can be better than that of 35mm film rolls. if so, what is the point of shooting with film rolls? maybe because the film rolls are expensive, only exclusive to the big budget films? i guess i am mystery buster. lol.

Bruce Greene, his forum name

i don't see that this dp provides a link to his film.

although there is argument that 2k projectors can be replaced with 4k projectors or 8k ones, on the other hand, 2k projectors have been there many years and nobody complains about the lack of resolution on the big screen about the movies shot with 35mm film. seems to me that the current trend of shooting with 35mm or 16mm film rolls is just another way trying to differentiate but does not provide real technical advancements.

larry wants to buy the hollywood? then creates a big ai database like oracle and an universal ai language like java? lol.

seems to me that the resolution specs have been saturated long time ago.

seems that he thinks the varicam's 720p is about the same resolution as red one on a 2 k projection.

"I guess I'm making these points to say that, detail wise, 720p is darned close to 1080p. And when shooting a movie almost every frame has some amount of motion blur, making the difference insignificant to the eye, even on a very large theatrical screen. The low light advantage of the 720p chips, and the slow motion capability make these cameras a true rival to any of the 1080p cameras that I saw demonstrated in the ASC camera assessment series last month. And while I wasn't able to compare the 720p Varicam directly to the 4k camera named after a color, I would say that after seeing the ASC tests, the 720p Varicam is about equal to or more detailed than that camera on a 2k projection."

"Recently I had the experience of showing a small movie we shot with the 27H tape based varicam on a very large screen in a multiplex projected through Barco DLP 2k projector. The movie was still a work in progress, and so we played it on my MacBook Pro in quicktime and plugged into the projector as a mirrored computer monitor." The earlier paragraph about the large screen.

Just came across this written by a dp in 2010: "The film was shot in 720p, mostly using an AJA I/O HD box and recording to a HD in Apple ProRes HQ, though a bit was recorded to tape and a few scenes (mostly in cars) were shot with an HPX170. The camera was set to FilmRec mode and we used the lowest setting that could capture the needed dynamic range of the scene. This was usually Dynamic Level 200%, but higher when necessary. This meant that the uncorrected movie looks a little bit low in contrast and saturation so the Quicktime player was set to slightly increase contrast and saturation. I was a little bit nervous that the 720p image on such a large screen might look a little soft, but it looked amazing! Going next door to glimpse a big Hollywood 35mm print revealed that the 720p digital projection looked as detailed as the 35mm print, and much cleaner and steadier of course. The Varicam projected had much more "life" than the dull 2k DI film print in the next theater (I'm talking about basic image quality, not the cinematography 🙂 )"

"You reach a level where that 5% more cannot justify the 10, 20x the price." true

olympus used to have the best jpeg engine.

no surprise. 3 ccd. 1/3 inch means bad low light and no bokur. otherwise, good color.

nice. so using xqd card can have much higher codec rates?

what is this xqd card for?

"What has happened is the gap between the top-end i.e. ARRI and the cheap stuff has closed up. This has been going on ever since the start of the DSLR revolution so it's not a new thing but there's never been a smaller gap that exists now, for example between something like the Alexa 35 and a $1000 used Panasonic S1H." True

5d3 ml raw can do 1:1 1920x1920. i tried once, like hassy in video.

pantax cameras are good for mf lenses in the current era. i have a pentax q, amazed at its support for mf lenses even with such a small body.

at certain point, the lens industry is more for other things than the iq. canon l lenses are a good example, dust free, build quality (fine for me on this), af, optical is (fine for me in certain situations). they are working horses, but not creative tools. use another example, vintage voigtlander heliar lenses are so good for portrait. not sharp, but good enough, great oof, just right on the spot for human faces, even better in bw. even 50 years ago, they did it right.