Noah Yuan-Vogel

From the published specs of the newer Kinefinity Terra cameras, it says they can shoot up to 5K/6K ProRes so that may no longer be the case.

Yes I was going to throw in a qualification about my statement only being about image quality vs file size. Certainly there are workflow concerns that may trump those. Then again I'd be skeptical about how much more 444 or XQ really gives you for 4k from a 4.6k bayer source especially considering the framerate limitations, but I'm sure some people will want to use it anyway.

So Arri is only relying on the lower gain ADC for the top two stops of DR to overcome the DR-limited ADC? No other special stuff going on? So in a way the combined ADC is effectively 14.8bit I guess?

My understanding is that the 4.6k can shoot UHD prores downscaled from the full 4.6k sensor. Keep in mind it's up to 60fps for UHD Prores HQ but the UHD Prores 444 and XQ max is 40fps. Also the 4.6k RAW 4:1 bitrate is pretty close to UHD Prores HQ so it may not make sense to shoot UHD at more than Prores HQ anyway.

I just saw it in 2D as well and often noted several scenes with high motion blur that could have been a 270deg or 360deg shutter angle. It was a little jarring to me, but I didn't quite seem like the whole movie was shot that way, maybe certain scenes were? I also noticed a bit more digital colored noise in the shadows in some scenes which surprised me, but overall I definitely enjoyed the movie anyway.

4:2:0 for avccam recorded internally, 4:2:2 out through HD-SDI to external recorder. You probably wouldnt want 4:2:2 at 24Mbps anyway, since that'd be packing 33% more data into an already rather minuscule compressed bitstream. ie. it'd look like 18Mbps 4:2:0 but with more color resolution.

We can't see your images, you seem to have 3 images linked (like "https://cpanel25.syra.net.au:2083/viewer/home%2fstrictly%2fpic/Shoot.jpg") but the links may be through your website's secure private cPanel back-end not through a publicly accessible website. Try copying and reposting the links from your website, not from your administration page.

Agreed, my understanding is that LEDs (especially ones designed for high-cri and specific color temp) are not likely to have much higher luminous efficiency than HMI and that manufacturer's claims about 40W fixtures being 500W equivalents are more related to LEDs having a higher efficiency non-adjustable lens and reflector on each lamp and on their standard 'flood' / 'spot' beams being narrower than the that of most fixtures to which they are compared. Plus they are likely comparing to tungsten softbox units which of course would be larger sources and have a very different quality of light from a 1x1 LED fixture. Comparing diffused light to very focused (LED) light would be quite difficult. For example, the photometrics published by litepanels on their 1x1 standard spot are pretty similar to that of lowel's tungsten rifa 500w softbox, but the softbox is a diffused single source with 4x the area and essentially 180degree beam angle versus a smaller LED multi-source fixture with a 30degree beam angle. A better comparison to LED might be a fresnel source, in which case the 40w 1x1 lightpanel photometrics are closer to a 150w Arri tungsten fresnel. So perhaps a 4x4 could be compared to 2k tungsten fresnel, where you'd need a bit of diffusion for the LEDs to match the evenness of the 2k and the 2k would need a bit of diffusion to match the size of the LEDs. I'd be interested to see how the 4x4 compares to a 575W HMI Par with varying degrees of 4x4 diffusion on each. Having not used a Litepanels 4x4 myself, I'd be interested to hear what someone who has thinks.

Hey Ari, Good luck! If you ever need a goofy no budget light kit in NYC, you know where to call. Let us know how it turns out.

hey Frank! Great to see you on here. Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions. I was actually worried it was too cutty rather than too slow. I have a lot of trouble getting proper final versions of my work to provide partly due to most things in my reel being finished and delivered in either 2-5 days or 1+ year. Ill write more when I'm back in the US in a few days.

I just updated my reel, and I would be interested in any criticisms and feedback on it since I update it periodically. You can see it here: http://noahyv.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10&Itemid=19 Really I'm open to any criticisms, so please share your thoughts. Pretty much everything on there was shot entirely with my light kit and a Canon 7D or Sony EX1. A lot of it is actually from web comedy content I've shot, though shots from a dramatic feature and short I shot are in there too. I'd prefer to get more work in dramatic narrative so that is the aim of the reel, if that helps focus your critique. Thanks for watching!

Really nice concept and look. The anamorphic aspect ratio really feels right for this given the size of the shoe and the horizontal direction of all the action. Is it wider than 2.4:1? 16:9 with 1.5x anamorphic perhaps? (=2.66:1?) It's a great look and I'd be interested to know what kinds of things you did for the color, some of it almost looks HDR/tonemapped but never overly so, might just be the combination of low contrast grading and post sharpening. Only criticisms I have at the moment are I had to watch it several times to appreciate the backgrounds since the cuts are so fast, and it seems a bit long for that sort of concept. It is very interesting, but too repetitive for more than a :30. The lens looks really nice, but it sounds like it could be quite hard to use in a shot that does not have fixed focus and a static camera. I noticed the out of focus highlights in one ext night shot look a little funky, but i suppose that may be expected for an old lens, though they also dont look like your usual anamorphic bokeh. Any info you can give on this?

Really nice looking shots. I'd be interested to know how carefully you planned those shots and the lighting and what kind of lights you used. How long did it take to shoot the whole thing? Also, did you shoot the whole thing at 24p or did you do some 720/60p? My only critique is that I don't think the red/amber grad works well for the content, it sort of takes away from the beauty of the place, making it look like there is always a sort of surreal storm is overhead. I can see the effect you were going for, but maybe it just would have worked better if the effect were not as strong. The juxtaposition of colors is interesting, it just seems too intense.

From what I understand, isos 100,200,400,800,1600 are all native (hardware gain only), whereas 120,250,500,1000,2000 use the same hardware gain as the lower native step plus 1/3stop of software gain and 160,320,640,1250 use the same hardware gain as the higher native step plus -1/3 stop of software gain. Hardware gain increases are able to increase sensitivity with minor noise increases, whereas software gain can only appear to change exposure by shifting midpoints and throwing away shadow or highlight detail. The -1/3stop software gain levels appear to have the least noise because they simply throw away shadow/noise detail. for example isos 160-250 all have the same clip point with different black and mid points, so if a practical is blowing out at iso250 and you lower 2/3stops to iso160 to compensate, the practical should still be clipping but the rest of the image will appear darker and image noise will appear lower. Whereas if all steps were implemented with hardware gain, the practical that just clips at iso250 might not clip at isos 200 or 160 but the difference in noise level would be less dramatic. If someone has evidence otherwise I'd be interested to see it as I dont believe Canon has verified any of the theories out there.

True, but in practice sensor size will affect focal lengths used and circle of confusion which are factors in the equation. I think it is quite reasonable to talk about sensor size as having a direct and inversely proportional relationship to DOF since it will be very probable in most normal systems that do not have wildly unusual CoC or optics.

You are talking about running a network over USB3.0? I wasnt aware that was possible, I guess I imagined it is possible to do that over USB but IP networking certainly doesnt seem like what USB was designed for. I'm sure there would be cable length issues. Most USB uses I am familiar with use 1-to-1 host-device connections and I doubt standard USB drivers would support much else. I could be wrong though. Seems like if you really need extra speed for a renderfarm the old routes of trunked GigE or 10GigE or Infiniband, or maybe a Fibre SAN would be the way to go. It would be cool to be able to harness new superfast super cheap buses like USB3 to speed things up instead, though, but I think it could be more trouble than its worth since they were really meant for connecting one fast device 3ft away not 100 computers 100' away.

Can you open any of those window flaps? Or cut a hole or pull up a part of the tent not in frame? This could be augmented with reflectors, mirrors, or white materials as well. This might help bring some daylight fill into the area and allow you to kill the tungsten lights altogether. Otherwise, splitting the temp at 4300k-ish as was suggested and if you are shooting digital dialing down your color matrix or saturation a bit could significantly reduce the visibility of the mixed temp lighting though it will of course affect your whole image which may or may not be desirable. Doing some color work in post could also help (pushing highlights red and shadows blue).

Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) of the lens helps represent the measured sharpness of the lens. As I understand it, MTF actually measures the contrast rendered by imaging systems and/or imaging components at different spacial frequencies which is directly related to how we perceive sharpness and detail. This might help better describe it: http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF.html .

Not sure what you mean by that. Could you elaborate? Are you saying you think that for some reason an image that represents a 90deg FOV on S35 will have perspective that is poorly rendered compared to an image that represents a 90deg FOV on FF35? As for what lenses to get, I might recommend trying a few out in the store that are of the range and stop and price you are looking for. I'm not sure why exactly Ben recommended against zooms, but I think they can be a valuable option considering the additional cost and work that a set of primes will cause, not to mention you might have trouble finding a good set of well-matched primes intended for still cameras that also have good traits for filmmaking. Personally, I like the way Sigma zooms look. I have found the ones I chose breathe surprisingly little and hold focus through a zoom surprisingly (definitely not perfectly) well. I find the look of modern canon still lenses a bit distracting as they have a very particular look that is rarely seen in moving pictures (until lately) and that I consider to be quite different from nikon, zeiss, sigma, etc. which each have their own look but seem to me much closer to eachother in their look than a Canon lens (of course this varies depending on when the lens was made). For me, my Sigma 24-70 2.8 lives on my camera a fair amount of the time but I also have a Sigma 70-200 2.8, Tokina 11-16 2.8, and a nikon 55mm f1.2, all of which I can recommend (I can give you specifics as to which generations of these lenses I prefer if that is of any help), and I can also highly recommend KEH for buying lenses as most of those lenses were purchased there. The only lens of those that I consider a compromise for a still lens set (of course they are all compromises compared to certain cine lenses) is the nikon, but it was just such a good deal and I wanted to have that save-your-ass super fast lens for the inevitable ultra low budget night ext's but I didnt really want to spend money on it. It does have surprisingly good mechanics compared to almost all the many other old old Nikons I've had the misfortune of using, though. Most of the lenses I've mentioned sell for around $400-600 used at KEH except for the 55mm f1.2 which was $254.

It definitely does make a difference. Here are some very basic tests I did regarding shadow noise levels for varying ISO/WB settings: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/canon-eos-7d-h...oise-tests.html (the second image first column should be labeled WB not ISO) These of course dont tell you anything about any of the other characteristics of the image, but I think it gives you a narrow view that helps give a pretty good idea of what to do if you absolutely want the cleanest shadows. On the other hand, I always use HTP despite the negative impact on shadow noise since I always prefer more highlight detail. I only ever turn it off if working with a scene that is low enough contrast there is no chance of anything coming within a stop of blowing out, or if the scene has a lot of important detail in the highlights since things get a bit washed out in the highlights with HTP as highlight contrast is reduced. Clearly 5000k is the best WB to use, as expected for a silicon-based imaging sensor. I do agree that the difference is not as pronounced as in RED ONE, though.

Most of the characteristics of your image will be dependent on size of the chip, including DOF. Lens format (2/3", 35mm, etc) only generally describes the largest format imaging plane you can put the lens on and still be sure the image circle cover it throughout its zoom/focus range and tells you the image plane format that the lens is optimized for. The only characteristics that might be affected by the lens format are vignetting (not relevant here) and sharpness. Some lenses designed for 2/3" 1080p might look soft on a 1/2" 1080p camera since the lens MTF stays the same but 1/2" camera has smaller photosites, effectivey blowing up the lens's image a bit more, however this might be somewhat balanced out by the fact that MTF is usually higher in the center of the lens, which is the part you are blowing up by using a smaller sensor.

Using a lens with a smaller image circle doesn't seem likely to prevent vignetting. They are much more likely to cause vignetting. Perhaps you misheard him? Using a 16mm lenses when shooting 2k can be beneficial for other reasons, however. One reason being that shooting wide angles will be possible with 16mm lenses at 2k. Also, keep in mind that the 35mm equivalents referenced in the EX1/3 specs refer to full frame 35mm (still film) field of views. By my calculations the EX1/3 stock lens is equivalent to about a 20mm lens on a RED One depending somewhat upon whether you are shooting 4k 4.5k or quadHD etc.

Trevor, not sure what you mean by real 1080p. It certainly does record 1920x1080 pixels and I'm fairly sure as far as anyone knows it reads an equal number of photosites. As for resolving power, it may be a bit lower than some HD cameras and higher than others. 3CCD is nice but has implications for lenses and there are no 3CCD 35mm-sized cameras, so its one or the other, and im fairly sure the 7D has more sensor area than any 3CCD's sensors combined and uses more total photosites than several popular Panasonic 3CCD HD cameras. Audio inputs and shoulder mounts are very easy to add for a small price. Removable lens mount cannot be added to fixed-lens cameras at any price. I think the 7D is a good choice. Why not just buy it new? it still falls in your price range and they should hold value fairly well given demand from both video and still shooters. I got mine new with a 10% off coupon and bought the kit and sold the lens for a profit (kit costs $200 more than body, lens can be sold off for ~$300). At that price, youll probably pay less than a lot of people who paid retail would ask you to pay for their used camera, especially since the camera is so new. I could be wrong, though.

Yes, This is definitely a problem with some older AI and AIS Nikkors. I think Paul is talking about something else, since im not sure how FF gear lash would contribute to this issue. It certainly seems like optical elements shift back and forth quite a bit in these lenses when you change focus direction. My take on this was always that these 30year old still photo lenses either are prone to internal elements becoming loose or maybe they have just always been like that since such an effect would never be noticeable when operating the lenses for still photography. Either way, this is why I am very very skeptical of the use of such old still photo lenses for motion picture applications. I've always been a little surprised I hadnt heard more about this since I often hear people raving about the quality of old nikon still lenses and cant seem to agree. I have a few zeiss contax still photo lenses I like to use and certainly have better mechanics than nikons about the same age and have some dampening and no sign of loose bits, but even these lenses I find have a weird issue with the aperture blades closing into an odd pattern, creating some odd bokeh when shooting with the aperture 1-4 stops down from open (imagine a polygon with sharp spikes sticking out of it). Moral of the story is probably that still photo lenses made over 20years cant be relied upon. Next time I try to use still lenses for cinematography, I plan to test them very very carefully.