Sony F23 vs. 16 mm

Landon D. Parks · December 27, 2007

The point people are missing is that when the film is showing in theaters, the audience watching your film is probably not going to be able to tell that the HD shot movie had a few less colors than Film can capture... Or that the skin tones looked weird.

In the theater if a movie was shot on HD then you have nothing to compare it to as fare as Film. It's fairly easy to see a difference between the two most of the time, IF you have something side by side to compare it to.

My point: The average (99.95%) of the audience is not overly technical when it comes to things like Skin tones, color pallet, exact resolution, etc.

A lot of people complain that HD does not have enough resolution to show in theaters... Yet when I went to see Spy Kids 2, it was so sharp it almost appeared that it was an animated movie. They actually could have cranked there resolution and sharpening down quit a bit without any complaint from me.

Edited December 27, 2007 by Landon D. Parks

Walter Graff · December 27, 2007

Thankfully watching a film is a subjective presentation becuase these 'weird sking tones' that some of you talk about just don't seem weird to me. Apocolypto? Not a strange shot that I could see.

Stephen Williams · December 27, 2007

Hi Landon,

Your missing the point that this is a cinematography forum. Many people are very passionate about producing the best images possible, were not producers trying to save a dime because it's good enough.

There is plenty of low quality films & television for the visually impaired masses to view IMHO.

Stephen

The point people are missing is that when the film is showing in theaters, the audience watching your film is probably not going to be able to tell that the HD shot movie had a few less colors than Film can capture... Or that the skin tones looked weird.

In the theater if a movie was shot on HD then you have nothing to compare it to as fare as Film. It's fairly easy to see a difference between the two most of the time, IF you have something side by side to compare it to.

My point: The average (99.95%) of the audience is not overly technical when it comes to things like Skin tones, color pallet, exact resolution, etc.

A lot of people complain that HD does not have enough resolution to show in theaters... Yet when I went to see Spy Kids 2, it was so sharp it almost appeared that it was an animated movie. They actually could have cranked there resolution and sharpening down quit a bit without any complaint from me.

K Borowski · December 27, 2007

If people CAN see the difference side by side, and the better-looking colors are almost always offered by film-originated material (better yet optically- or contact-printed film material), then, as someone who would, theoretically, be in charge of all aesthetic decisions in the photography of a movie, I would feel obligated to go with the material that looked better, side-by-side, unless there were a compeling reason to do otherwise for needs that suited budget or story. I could give two shits what some drunk in an audience thinks, I'd care about the way MY movie would look because it'd be MY job. If you want to get by with tricking the lowest-common denominator into thinking your movie looks just as good as film, Landon, when in actuality it does not, maybe you had better be a still photographer. For the most part, they seem to all share the same money-first, look-second mentality that you do.

David, if someone else told me they'd seen 90% of the major HD-shot movies out there, I'd laugh at them. Coming from you, however, wow, that's pretty amazing. Even still, benefit of the doubt, maybe there's at least a COUPLE of films where they pulled off good-looking skin tones throughout the whole thing? Maybe you missed them? I think there must be at least one movie out there that, despite being shot digitally, had either a cinematographer or a post guy that worked very hard to avoid the problems of digital color rendition. I've never seen a movie such as this either, but I'm sure there must be at least one, maybe a short film?

Walter, yes, it was Apocalypto, thanks. No, I couldn't honestly say "hey, that looked digital" if you had showed me every shot in that movie separately, but there were many that did have that look to them, on HDTV. I would agree with you and David that the few films I have seen shot on the Genesis, this being one of them, have not been as bad as F900 stuff I've seen. I really haven't seen any films I can recall that have been shot exclusively on the F23 or F950, but I'm sure they are not going to be better than Genesis. Even the Red footage I've seen has the same color problems.

Frankly, I find it very surprising that "film color" has been so hard to emulate digitally. Sure, it may be an artifact of the film system, but film color is by no means perfect; digital color is, according to scientists who have devised the tests at least, much more accurate. With a more accurate color system, without the bit-depth compression that is so common, I find it hard to believe someone could not write an algorythm that would make a more-accurate, high bit-depth color system like a less-accurate system. Emulation is the thing, after all, at which digital should excel.

Edited December 27, 2007 by Karl Borowski

Tenolian Bell · December 27, 2007

Check out the trailer for Speed Racer, which was shot on the F23

Speed Racer is an all greenscreen movie. The colors had little to do with the F23.

I had a chance to test the F23 and their color gamut claim. It does have a greater color depth than film,

In a 2K DI S16 can be scanned at 4:4:4 log 16 bit per channel. Admittedly that would be an expensive scan for a lower budget show, but the F23 cannot record color at that depth.