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Can we talk about "The Crown"?


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Wasn't so much under the gun; just in nowhere in a hotel room prepping for the next morning. The fact it was in System and not in the other areas was what threw me for a long time (a whole beer's time!)

Got it eventually but when nowhere with no wifi to look it up and no prep, yeah wasn't great but certainly dind't put me off the system.

Yes know the feeling.. one of the main reasons I bought a camera and pretty much only use that camera ..I know it back to front now ,and no cold sweats trying to change settings in the heat of battle.. ! or in some hotel room in a small town in Outer Mongolia ..

Although system/base settings is fairly logical place to have it. no ?..

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Personally I think it would be better placed with the rest of the gamma settings/look settings like that. Seems to make more sense. System is kinda where I'd be looking to change it from 60hz to 50hz. Or maybe, better yet a new menu group, a major one, called "LOG" or something like that. So menu; then there's a "picture" or "look" main menu, with it in there, or a menu press then "log" right there in front of you.

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But I do think there is room for improvement because many cinematographers seem to find the need to light the camera to a lower ISO than the one being recording in S-Log for some odd reason, like set their meters to 1000 or 800 ISO when the camera is set to 1250 ISO. I don't know if they are using a waveform on the Rec.709 signal and feel it looks "low" when exposing at 1250 ISO, which suggests that Sony's internal conversion to Rec.709 for viewing needs to be tweaked, but if they are using the waveform to look at the S-Log signal and think it looks "low" then perhaps they just disagree with what Sony thinks where values should be placed in a log curve.

 

Whereas when shooting on an Alexa, setting your meter to 800 ISO and the camera to 800 ISO seem to line up just fine when using a waveform to look at the Rec.709 monitor output.

 

 

The F55 can be a little noisy at 1250 ISO, so most people rate it at 800 ISO. In CineEI mode, it's always recording at 1250 ISO, so when you change the ISO on camera, all it's doing is changing the gain applied to the LUT on the monitor. It makes no difference to the recording.

 

On a day exterior, you probably wouldn't see any noise, and there are plenty of people who use it at native ISO under those conditions, but for everything else 800 ISO seems to be the sweet spot for noise, just as some people rate the Alexa at 400ISO to get cleaner shadows.

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Personally I think it would be better placed with the rest of the gamma settings/look settings like that. Seems to make more sense. System is kinda where I'd be looking to change it from 60hz to 50hz. Or maybe, better yet a new menu group, a major one, called "LOG" or something like that. So menu; then there's a "picture" or "look" main menu, with it in there, or a menu press then "log" right there in front of you.

 

 

Yes sure Im not saying its the best menu.. I would do it differently too.. but thats probably the problem.. so would anyone else.. but the answer is also there.. first thing that comes up is the User menu.. you can have any individual item for any menu page.. or just the whole page.. its customizable (is that a word) down to the smallest item.. I very rarely ever go out of this menu.. everything is exactly as I would have it..

 

FYI there is no 50/60hz setting on the f5/55.. I prefer this.. you have all the shutter speeds and frame rates all the time.. non of this 50hz only values .. 60hz only..eg you are shooting 25p in the US but there is no 1/60th shutter.. bit of an idiot proof thing thats dangerously prosumer territory.. :)

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  • 2 years later...

Bit of a useless bump perhaps, a bit of a bummer to see this devolve into technical territory but I've just started watching this and I'm impressed by how good the F55 looks. It's always looked very videoey for me, except maybe with Vinyl, but that was heavily treated in post to make it "look" like film so to speak. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I watched all of it.......seasons 1-4....with interest.....not only because Gibraltar comes up a few times...but because I remember so much of what was featured.....

I was an art student at Chelsea School of Art in London during the coal miners strike....I even went out on a demonstration on the streets in support of the miners.......I remember Thatcher well.....I avoided paying poll tax as left the country before they put it in my borough.....I remember her Falklands War....we refitted the SS Uganda as a hospital ship in Gibraltar (I remember as a kid cycling up to the Dockyard to look down on the works)....I remember being part of the crowd on the streets back in 1981 as a 15 year old when Charles and Diana came to Gibraltar to board the Royal Yacht Britannia for their honeymoon....

...but mainly because the British Royal family are and have been very much a part of my work since I first started designing/producing postage stamp issues for Gibraltar since 1994. In that time I have looked through thousands upon thousands of images of the Royal family.....commissioned quite a few of them from image libraries and still do......I was even official photographer for a Royal visit to Gibraltar some years ago......that was interesting......and everything I do goes to Buckingham Palace for approval.....

......so the first hurdle watching this was the actors playing the main parts .........fantastic acting by the main characters (notwithstanding woefully second-rate acting by the, for example, the effete (another cliché) members of parliament etc etc)....Olivia Colman as the Queen......Gillian Anderson as Thatcher....John Lithgow as Churchill......Claire Foy as the young Queen.....Matt Smith fantastic as the Duke.......and the best of all Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret.....and so on and on...fantastic acting.....top rate from the main characters......

the cinematography...in my opinion.....well......it doesn't rain that much in England by the way.....well, it didn't in the 6 years I lived in London.....so much rain all the time and its all so dark......its actually a relief when they cut to outdoors stuff....not least the Tour of the Commonwealth (apply Kodachrome LUT) when the Queen was young.....office scenes depicted with no lights overhead but desk lamps......practicals galore.......every interior scene is hazy and diffused.......every light coming in from large windows in streaks and contrived......its all very self indulgent isn't it......but wtf.....great technical lighting right and looks very moody and expensive.....every episode a few millions as its budget?....well they should have invested in some Kodak to make it look less make-believe at least in young Queen episodes.......but what the hell I'm sure it will win some cinematography awards and who am I to comment.....oh and they filmed the Beverly Hills segment in Sotogrande, a few km's from where we are....

That being said.....roll on season 5 lets see how they depict the Princess Diana death and so on.....

Edited by Stephen Perera
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On 12/31/2017 at 2:01 PM, Samuel Berger said:

One thing I noticed is that the C300 Mark II and the UMP are both in the "approved" list of cameras for Netflix partners. But the C200 wasn't. I'm unsure why that is. It shouldn't concern me as I don't work for them, but it makes me wonder if that list reflects public opinion of what a "pro" camera is.

The "approved list" is kinda meaningless really, because very few of us on this thread are doing productions commissioned by Netflix themselves. (if you're selling a completed product to them, it doesn't matter what you shot it on, you could have filmed on a potato)

And if you do find yourself somehow (unlikely) shooting a Netflix commissioned production, you'll have plenty of budget to get whatever camera your heart desires.

Edited by David Peterson
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