Mark Kenfield

A 2/3" cinema camera is a very niche product these days. Personally I think $5k is a reasonable amount for any tool that capable. You're operating at such tiny percentages of the original purchase value, that it's really just a question of what an interested party would pay. For anyone with a tidy set of some of the amazing 2/3" glass that came out around the same time (Digiprimes, Fuji Zooms etc.) I think it'd be well worth it.

For a very on-the-nose sales pitch (for a product that's of no interest to me personally) it actually managed to hold my attention for the whole three minutes! Well done Sat, looks really polished. Did you find the S360 sped things up much (by being a mid-sized source in and of itself)?

In hindsight, that seems pretty bloody obvious all of a sudden! 😂

What David said. Some S35mm anamorphics will give you a little more leeway though. The Master Anamorphics for example, can cover the full height of the LF sensor down to the 28mm(!), you won’t get the full width of the sensor, but you can get a full-height 2:1 extraction. So 3096x3096, or a 1.43x difference (which isn’t insignificant).

Fortunately I didn't have to go beyond those two calculations! It's a weird feeling though - googling "exposure/lighting/photometric/footcandle calculator" for ten minutes without success, then realising if you walk 4m over to your bookshelf and the trusty old ASC manual, you can figure it all out the old-fashioned way. It was kinda shocking to realise how rarely I interact with real books, and physical paper and pen these days.

I'm feeling pretty legit this evening... Flexing my cinemathography muscles.

I looooove a good, creepy zoom.

I love a good superwide when there's cause for it. My favourite focal length (if I had to pick one) is probably a 21mm (on S35mm), which seems to be about as wide as you can go without perspective distortion starting to make things look weird. But there's so many interesting things you can do with an ultrawide perspective.

This is something I do all the time. Ain't nobody got time for dual-standage! - Castor wheels for the stand (for rapid repositioning) - Triple header to hold your lightsource(s) + grip head - Get an umbrella (sized to taste) with either Diffusion or White for bouncing into

Because (up against the Amira) you're comparing one of the easiest cameras (to physically work with on set) with one of the most complicated. The F65 is an imaging beast, but it's also a bit of a beast to work with. I've come close to pulling the trigger on one several times (the price is certainly right!), but the compressed codecs don't let you use variable framerates, and the raw files are very large. So it's a bit of an all or nothing camera.

I've always found Alexa/Amira footage a bit noisy at it's native 800 ISO. Not in any objectionable way, but it's very clearly there in the shadows. At 400 ISO though (which is where I'll generally shoot the camera unless I'm short on light) I'd consider it SQUEAKY clean. Can you post some examples? I general, I'd always be wary of underexposing digital images. By which I don't mean placing things in the shadows, but rather putting anything in a situation where you're going to have to lift the shadows in post. A one-stop push is rarely a problem, but by two your always into nasty territory.

At the expendables suppliers here in Oz, we have "camera covers" which are just big clear plastic "bags" (essentially), which we just cut holes in, where needed, for monitors, evf etc. A bit of tape around the edges of the cuts (to help reinforce them a little) helps a lot. And if you really want to go all out - velcro strips along the bottom to hold the "opening" of the bag together is pretty tidy (most of the time we just use tape or clamps. Here's an F35 with the bag treatment:

Not really, because the single usages that we're individually responsible for aren't the issue (beyond simple, personal feel-good metrics) - it's the sum total of the waste generated by each medium that matters (for the sake of comparison/overall environmental impact and sustainability). I have no ideas what those respective numbers would be, but I'd be fascinated to know.

What human endeavour isn't? It the nature of consumption, it's a destructive process. The chemical output and waste from photochemical processing sure as hell wasn't a nice thing. But I do wonder how it compared to the overall natural cost of digital, where the devices become obsolete and discarded so much more rapidly than mechanical film cameras ever were.

I'd agree with this. I'm of that lucky generation that studied purely photochemical photography through school and university, to emerge out into the real world in 2008... to the GFC, the Red One and the 5D Mkii 🤨 I don't know if I could have timed things much worse if I'd tried!