Tyler Purcell

True! But if it can't be scanned properly on OTHER scanners, then that's also an issue. I'm pretty sure CineLab London would have used an Arriscan, which is an entirely different beast than most scanners on the market. What it can achieve color wise, is a miracle honestly. We actually were part of a test which scanned on a Scanity and it had nearly identical results to my tests. So I know the Scanity has the same issues our scanner has.

Interesting. Yea in our initial tests, I was so completely frightened by the results, I basically gave up testing. Literally the worst looking stock I've ever put on the film scanner in my entire career, which is saying a lot as I've tested everything you can imagine. But if it works in the situation you're describing, maybe it's worth another go, I have so much left!

Yea, a DI to film output has FAR better blacks, night and day. You can actually record out REAL black, which you can't actually do on a photochemical finish. We've done several record outs, right from my the very computer I'm typing this on to you and I've been blown away how much black detail I can achieve. So why can't you get blacks black? Because it's risky. You could easily lose them. So most people don't try to get them that deep. Different projection lamp brightnesses and throws, can irreparably hurt the black level. Just watch any movie from the 70's to the late 90's and you'll see they light the blacks very carefully to make sure you can see detail. Even a classic like Taxi Driver, which on BluRay has deep rich blacks with detail, is missing a lot of detail on film in areas they didn't light. Amazing what they actually caught on film, the digital presentation is stellar.

No, color saturation would always be better doing a DI, especially if a good CRT recorder or Arrilaser was used. The DLP systems for recording out like the Cinevator, they can be a bit "meh" on color compared to a CRT recorder or Arrilaser. The big difference with a photochemical finish is the softness and the fact you won't see as much of the film grain. So it winds up being a really soft and beautiful image, more painterly. The silver moving, grain and almost 3D color aspects of film projection, don't change if it was done entirely photochemically or digitally. As I said above, the DI treatment to Tenet was outstanding. Nolan does it, to keep the knowledge in existence. Also, to limit what he can do with the color, so people don't go all crazy with it. I also think if you're dealing with large format, you probably want to strike the prints from the negative because it would be probably better quality over all than digital intermediate because the expense of doing a 6k or 8k record out, isn't worth it. Even Nolan can't afford that. So most movies are done in 4k and yea, a 5 perf 70mm or 15P 70mm print, for sure holds more res than that if photochemically finished. Interstellar the 35mm scenes were blown up to 15P and the prints were struck from the 15P negative, but the 35mm shots were several generations duplicated, so they looked like crap. Had he done a DI, it would have been a lot better. Dunkirk suffered this same problem with the 5 perf shots. I didn't see it as much in Oppenheimer, but Tenet was perfect due to the film being entirely done DI, there was no difference between the 5P blown up shots to 15P, they looked the same. The 15P shots would be reduction printed to 5P and the prints would be struck off the 5P negative. They didn't make many prints, so it's not like this destroyed the negative. I'm certain the 8k master they made from the camera negative, was done WAY before they even made the prints.

Cinelab musta graded it during the scan then. The nice thing about having your own scanner, is that you can see exactly what the film looks like, not what a colorist rendition is. We thread up Kodak or Fuji and it takes a few seconds to make it look perfect. The NC500 didn't work that way at all. But then again, we never tested indoors, so I appreciate the feedback and I'll have to do a test in 3200k lighting to see how it does. We tried this in the test above, but I felt the results were mixed due to us under lighting where I wanted it to be.

What color balanced light did you use for the shoot?

According to a quick search of the specs, it doesn't say the camera can create higher than 59.94 FPS on the HDMI output. I assume it can only do high speed in camera when set to HD mode, per the manual.

Which FYI does not look like any of the other tests shot on NC500. So that's why I'm a bit dubious. When suddenly something looks too good to be true, generally there is something we don't know. Until we know more answers, I'm skeptical based on my own results and working with the stock myself.

We've done lots of testing with NC500 and so has a few of my friends with the same results. We've had ultra long discussions here about the stock as well. I do know ORWO has done a lot of experimenting with new formulas that may work better, such as a yet to be released NC200. They also had the NC400 which came and went so fast, but the tests of those, were much better than the NC500. The video sample above, is nothing like any of our tests OR our friends tests of the same exact stock. So I'm slightly dubious of what we're seeing. Is it an all new prototype stock they haven't released yet or was it so heavily color graded, that you just can't tell and whoever did that, bravo! The main problem outside of the grain, is the yellow ish first layer of the emulsion. This balances the stock somewhere between daylight and tungsten, around 4000k, which makes it pretty much unusable without some sort of filtration or light source which matches the color balance. In most tests (ours included), nobody accounted for this issue, but clearly in the test above, those filmmakers did. I personally never did a test with the stock indoors under fixed studio lighting at 4000k. It's one thing I'm interested in doing with the remainder of my test stock we purchased when it was first released. At the time, they did not have 35mm available, so we only got 16mm and with the extremely poor quality, it was silly to invest more since we were buying the stock, unlike the reviewers who got it free. No matter what, we couldn't alter the color balance to get any decent skin tones out of it in broad daylight. Considering, we buy Kodak 35mm stock for half the price ORWO is asking for their loads, it's a no brainer what we'd shoot in the future. I also know the company does have some issues creating more stock since the first batch sold out. They haven't had any 16mm stock for sale in 8 months or so. There also hasn't been any word on updates to the stock or even a rebuttal from ORWO corporate from the video's we made, which got a lot of traction. I hear through the grape vine, they weren't happy with our tests and discoveries, which is kinda silly since I'm the target audience and wasn't paid to write a good review (something I would never do). To me, good products are very rare and if you're making a brand new film stock in 2024, it better be comparable to Kodak or it's not worth it.

Well, photochemical finishing of an entire film today, even a short film, is very expensive and time consuming. Plus, when you're dealing with formats us mere mortal's can use (8mm, 16mm, 35mm) the benefit of perhaps making an answer print off the original camera negative for the purpose of showing your movie, where it's downright cool to watch personally, doesn't offer your audience anything unique really. So what's the difference? Well think about it from an optics and loss standpoint. If you print film to another piece of film, even a contact print, you lose quite a bit of resolution first. So if your 35mm negative is 4k, your answer print is 2k. Now you have to project that print, which is another loss. In the end, you probably have 1000 lines on the screen, even with the best 35mm answer printing. Sure, the grain will be softer and it will be a more pure color science, but you lose so much in the process, it seems hardly worth it, even for 35mm. Nolan gets away with it because he shoots large format and when you're dealing with a negative 5x larger than 35mm, the losses in printing/projecting, aren't quite as great. Plus, the IMAX projection system is higher resolution then a standard ol 35mm projector due to how the film is pushed onto a piece of flat glass when it's illuminated by the lamp source, which is also way more even. Even 5 perf 70mm was a huge jump forward in on screen brightness, but it struggles with a lot of the same issues 35mm does. With digital finish, your film is scanned at high res (hopefully greater than 4k) into the computer, preserving the entire resolution of the image AND with good digital imagers, the color science to boot. Then you finish your film digitally in even HDR and distribute digitally. If you want a print, you can simply have someone record one out on a Cinevator, which is a 2k machine, but the quality isn't horrible. It's actually crisper than any standard 35mm print and it retains much of the dynamic range in the digital source, something that's hard to do with a photochemical finish. Where I've been impressed with what Nolan and Tarantino have accomplished in recent years using photochemical timing, I don't think any of that technology is available to the mere mortals. I agree that some parts of Dunkirk and Oppenheimer look pretty good, I don't think the films over-all have a better look than the HDR UHD version I saw at home. Tenet on the other hand, looks stellar on film because from my understanding, they recorded the entire film out. So the IMAX and 5 perf prints, are absolutely flawless. I remember reporting at the time of its release, how damn good the timing was, best I had seen on film in a long time and no way done photochemically, the blacks were too perfect. In the end, if your audience is watching on a tablet, phone, laptop or TV, grading photochemically makes no sense. If your audience is watching a film print only and you will never have a digital version, there could be an argument for making a print if you had the cash, but I would STILL do a digital finish for the sheer fact of having more control over the finished results.

Wait, you bought a camera that can't capture it's entire list of frame rates internally?

Sorry, D5MKII, I'm so use to putting those numbers the old way lol

Yea I'm new to Nikon digital imaging cameras for sure, but everyone loves the Z9 and Z8 cameras, both MUCH newer tech. I'll say this much, the R5 we currently shoot digital on, has to be one of the worst cameras I've ever used in my entire life. It's absolute garbage, horrible borderline unusable noise floor with FPN and pathetically bad rolling shutter that can't be fixed. At least Nikon has the rolling shutter problem solved. You can't even remap Canon cameras to get rid of bad pixels, it automatically does it and if the automatic stuff doesn't work, then you're screwed. No way to fix it. DR is also pathetically poor as well, thanks to the high noise floor. To get HDR you need to take two images which are blended together, like... what? LOL So yea, I think all of these cameras struggle with this tech and you kinda just deal with them. I couldn't stand the GH4 and GH5 cameras FYI, I thought they were utter garbage when I've shot with them. Panasonic is 3-5 years behind everyone else with their tech. Color science was the worst of any modern digital camera I've shot with and the smaller imager, kinda negates the point of shooting digital anyway. The FF imager is where it's at, especially for wider shots, getting that sweet shallow depth of field. Sony begrudgingly fixed their color science issues over the last few years, so at least they've made a decent camera for once, codec withstanding. I look forward to playing with the Z9 when we get it, hopefully by the summer. We would get the newer version (Z8) but it doesn't have the heat dissipation aspects of the Z9, so video is limited. To me, the important things are in order; color science, codec, resolution and imager size.

The Japanese brands have this weird internal competition and completely negate what the consumer wants. Nobody has really reinvented the wheel since the FS7 came around, what in 2011? Since then, all the cameras have been revisions of one another. Where it's true, the Canon C series are very good cameras, especially the C300MKIII and C500MKII, they are negated because frankly, why wouldn't you buy an FX9 or Red Komodo instead for that kind of money? Price wise, they don't fit into the marketplace at all. They've made a lame duck series of cameras, which as you pointed out, delivers excellent images, but is $3k too high for the market they're targeting. The medium end guys will shoot red and lower end guys can't afford the canon. Now to be fair, canon has 4 new cameras releasing this year. The EOS-RMKII, The 5DMKII and two cinema cameras. I'm not sure why they wouldn't bring a new cinema camera to NAB, so to me that was an odd decision in waiting. However, they will never introduce a killer camera for lower price, because they would then not sell any of the cameras they currently make. Canon and Sony purposely limit their lower end cameras so they aren't capable of doing what their higher end cameras can do. This is why I like Blackmagic so much, they don't play that game. If they release a better camera that undermines the previous generation, they will keep the pricing the same and they'll just blow out inventory of the older cameras. When I first picked up the Nikon Z9, I was blown away because they don't have any cinema camera. So they took all their high end tech and threw it into a camera and it's incredible. It's even large enough to dissipate heat, so it will record 8k 16 bit raw just like the red does, without any issues. So the Japanese makers CAN make really good cameras, if they didn't fight against one another. Sooner or later, people will simply stop buying their cameras and they'll have to release a small box like the Pyxis for $5k.

It's basically the same shape as nearly all the professional cinema cameras have been for the last what, 8 years or so? It also has a good OLED viewfinder system, something only Arri really has. The new sensor will come, BMD aren't going to give up on that aspect. I'm certain it will be one of their fancy new imagers like the 12k. SDI is the industry standard, HDMI is long dead and only exists for consumer equipment. People with HDMI monitors, aren't going to be buying a $5k camera (how much it actually costs to use) and then not buy a $549 SDI monitor along with it. The DSLR crowd is entirely different and most of them HATE HDMI and would sell all of their HDMI gear if they could have a camera with SDI, even mini-BNC.