Mark Kenfield

Yeah, after a bunch of fiddling that became apparent. Fortunately I was able to use the Arri Frame Guide Builder to create some custom 6:5 frame guides to import into the camera (with masks) to give us accurate framing, and then we just did the desqueeze in the monitors. Footage came out very nicely. I shot mostly at 400 ISO to compensate for the higher noise of smaller sensor area.

Not quite the look I'm going for Max 😆

Hi guys, We're prepping a Mini for a scope shoot at the moment, and we'll have one day of shooting where we're filming everything at 200fps. However the Mini doesn't seem to want to give us any kind of desqueeze options in the HD/2k (200fps-capable modes). The downsampled and desqueezed HD/2k recording modes top out at 120fps, so they're no good to us. And the 16:9 modes that can do 200fps just grey the desqueeze option out. Is there any way to get around this and have the camera desqueeze for us while shooting at 200fps? Or do we have to switch out to 3rd-party monitors in order to get the desqueeze? Would appreciate any wisdom on the topic anyone could throw at me. Cheers, Mark

Interesting, I've never actually encountered an F5(5) with the Prores upgrade before, so haven't been able to put it to use personally (the lack of 2k and 50p/60p in 4:4:4 made it difficult to justify the cost). I always found SR444 extremely clean (rated at my usual 1000 ISO - which was were my F5 actually exposed SLOG2/3 properly). Probably worth comparing the internal Prores4444 to SR444 output and see if there's a difference.

Thanks Phil 👍 appreciate the breakdown.

1.Without the expansion box, what is the highest possible quality of recording? ProRes 10 bit? Something comparable? There's several options: - 4k XAVC Class480 (the best non-raw 4k codec on the camera - this is a solid option) - 4k XAVC Class300 (too thin for my tastes, you need to drop down to this to record 4k @ 50/60p) - 1080p SR444 (my favourite internal codec on the camera - PERFECT supersampled 4:4:4 HD, tops out at 30p though) 2. Is the dynamic range really 14 stops? Close-enough. The highlight latitude is very good, you get 6-stops of overexposure headroom, which is excellent. 3. How are the skin tones? Fine IF you know how to grade the footage well. Always shoot SLOG3/Sgamut3.cine for the best results, the more limited colour gamut is much easier to wrangle nice results out of in post (and works okay, with a bit of tweaking, with the S709 colour science from the Venice). 4. Does it chew through batteries? No, it sips them. Power is a non-issue on the F5/F55 (compared to other cameras) 5. Is it good at around $6000 or will the camera go lower? $6000 is a BARGAIN. The prices of all digital cameras will always be falling (as they're superceded), but the F5(5) as still so relevant, that I don't think they drop much lower than this for quite some time to come. 6. What is the sensor size? I know "Super35" leaves a bit of variation in millimeters. It's pretty close to standard S35mm 24 x 12.7mm you won't notice any real difference between it and a 16:9 Alexa or Canon C300 (they're all in the same ballpark). Here are some links to framegrabs from narrative pieces I shot on the F5: At Last (shot in SR444): http://dreamsmiths.com.au/#/atlast/ Max (shot in 4k Raw) http://dreamsmiths.com.au/#/max/ Splendor Solis (shot in 4k Raw): http://dreamsmiths.com.au/#/splendor-solis/ Walk the Earth (I think shot in 4k XAVC): http://dreamsmiths.com.au/#/walk-the-earth/

As good as they've ever come. I listened to his soundtrack to The Mission last night to remember him. It's still my favourite I think, just hauntingly beautiful.

Nope, it's the XR module that opens up the surround view of the sensor for recording extra resolution. With an XR to SxS adapter, you can still use SxS cards to record Prores though.

Just using nets/scrims to control the level? Thanks Sat 👍 it was all shot day-for-night, so a bit of gripping required(!) but having the precision of the Dedolights for keying was just a delight. Diffusion-wise I'm pretty sure I went extra light on that one, probably 1/8 BPM.

That's a good point David. And it's perhaps one of the things that bugs me - the number of situations we shoot where a soft-key is (logically) kind of ridiculous. But we bend over backwards to force one in there anyway. I feel like if I could really nail down a nice, smooth approach to hard-keys in those situations, I'd feel a lot better about not shoe-horning in soft light (at the expense of considerable rigging/gripping time) just "because". Did you have a go-to ratio for your key:fill in The Love Witch?

Because I'm bored of everyone lighting everything the same way? Because it could look great and be seamless anyway? Because I'm an inherently contrarian person with an overriding compulsion to feel special and unique? Because wrangling soft light is a goddamned nightmare (unless your wardrobe and set dressers make EVERYTHING else dark for you)? I don't know. But I feel like it could work (IF you could pull it off as well as Méheux does) and now I really want to try. There's so many situations I could light SO much faster, if I could simply key them with flaggable/cuttable/controllable hard lights. There's only one thing I've shot with purely hard keys, which was a short satire I did last year, and I thought it worked okay. I don't think the results look particularly old-fashioned:

The control panel is on the assistant's side of the camera. That really tells you all you need to know. Without a crew, I'd advise against it.

Obviously everything depends on context, and if you were seeing a whole bunch of overhead fluorescents before moving into your closer coverage, I'd agree, it's unlikely to look right. However if you were out at the petrol pump, or in the car, then just cut into a scene over the counter. Without a broader context of the space I don't think (if you did it as smoothly as Méheux does it) that anyone would question it.

I think it's a very fair comparison. I'd call it the same look. It's so smooth, that you could slot it into any narrative context and it would look just fine. I'd love to know the recipe. Is it really just a single hard key and a single hard fill source (I assume it must be to get such a clean result)? I feel like the 'glamour' aspect is more-so a function of the setting, and the higher exposure levels on Bond and Onatopp (relative to the background actors around them). I guess my initial point/question is moreso that I think you could take that exact same key lighting, use it in that gas station convenience store, and (assuming you had your exposure and colour at a level that suited the ambient environment, I think you'd get away with it just fine (because it's so smooth/unobtrusive).

Hi guys, Just had this clip pop up in my feed, and I was struck by the key lights in the first section around the card table: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8TYyn-k40 Straight-up hard keys. And they look great, almost seamless. I had to actually pause the clip at first to confirm that it was actually hard lighting. I feel like you could use this lighting in any contemporary film and "get away with it" without spoiling the look or feeling incongruous with the soft-lit keys that (these days) shape the vast majority of shots. Indeed, most of Goldeneye is very much soft-lit. Now I know this is Phil "F**king" Méheux's work, and I'm not worthy to smell the ground he cinematographically walks on. But I'd love to hear how people would approach a situation like this. I feel like it's reasonably obvious that the hard lights were simply the only practical way to pick out Bond and Onatopp from the crowd is such a large, and crowded environment (they look about a stop hotter than everyone else, which serves that purpose really nicely. Also, with such a large table, and a lot of top-light providing the general ambience, booming in softer keys for the close-ups would have been obviously time-consuming and a bit problematic. But why do these keys look so smooth and seamless (when others so rarely do)? Is it just a really precise key-to-fill ratio? I'd love to hear people's thoughts. I feel like mastering this kind of hard-lighting would make a lot of nightmare lighting situations (like this one) a great deal easier. Trying to wrangle big soft sources all the time can be a real pain.