Tyler Purcell

In the past, the high grade tapes had better back coating on them and denser particles. With HiFi audio, you needed those denser particles to reduce FM modulation noise. Today however, I don't think there is any difference. I bet both tape stocks are identical, the only difference is how much tape is on the reel. Back in the day T160 tapes were actually thinner, but today nobody uses tape so they probably don't make multiple thicknesses anymore. I don't know of any multi-machine VHS duplication facilities anymore. I pulled out several facilities over the years. :(

Long GOP can be encoded by the GPU portion of a processor, leaving the CPU portion to crunch the imager data. Plus since these cameras mostly record 8 bit 4:2:0, there is far less actual processing involved. The conversion happens on the fly in real time. Pro Res by contrast, can't be encoded with a GPU, it's CPU only. So if your CPU is busy dealing with the data coming off the imager, then it also has to deal with encoding Pro Res, that's a huge problem. I mean just do a test with 10 bit Pro Res encoding on your desktop vs .h264. On mine, Pro Res takes ALOT longer then using a GPU friendly .h264 program. I can spit out compressed 8 bit, 4:2:0 Long GOP files VERY quickly. Raw is MUCH simpler to deal with if was simply streamed onto the card. However, now you're dealing with bandwidth issues related to media. I'm not sure if Cinema DNG (which is just a string of tiff files), can be compressed with the GPU efficiently. I think the reason Blackmagic gets away with a low-cost pro res license camera is because they make so few cameras compared to the other brands. That's not an excuse in my mind, Sony COULD produce a low-yield camera line, specifically with those codec's for a lower price. Make a "version" of the A7SMKII with Pro Res, why not? I just don't think they CAN. TO make it work on the FS7, they needed more hardware. To make it work with the F5, they needed a software patch. Thus showing you how much better/faster the processor and media system is in the F5 compared to the FS7. Also, Canon has ZERO excuse. The C series cameras all use media that's plenty fast enough. They absolutely don't make or sell enough C series cameras for the Pro Res licensing issue a problem with pricing either. If the C500 was Pro Res XQ and Cinema DNG Native, but was $12,000, people would still buy it. They would actually probably dominate the market because as I said before, the C500 is just a magnificent looking camera. None of the issues of the Sony imager (in that price point), which I'm not a fan of what so ever.

The problem is, unlike PC's which don't have any sub-system for media, you have to add it with plugins, apple has a built-in media plugin system called Quicktime. Almost all editing programs use quicktime as the base for decoding media. Since DNx is NOT native to quicktime, you have to install a special plugin to get DNx to work at all in your editing program. So the DNx is translated into something quicktime understands and then you can playback. That translation is slow, it's not really "native". Similar to Pro Res on windows. Some programs like Avid and DaVinci, don't use the quicktime engine, so they don't care. They can take DNx files without any 3rd party plugins. Of course, if you have 4500 media clips and you want to watch them before importing, it's nice to have file level viewing capabilities, so that's where being quicktime native is nice. I do a lot of work on Windows systems, reading pro res works fine. Exporting is a problem because it's only 32 bit. DaVinci supposedly has a 64 bit Pro Res export tool, but I don't know anyone who would run DaVinci on windows besides yourself. Everyone I know uses Linux or Mac OS to run a coloring solution. Partially because they're far more stable operating systems that can run for 24/7 without needing a reboot. In terms of graphics cards, your card is pretty powerful. Most computers have Intel onboard graphics, with shared RAM as video memory. The rest of them, have super low-end mobile graphics units, either on PCI boards or soldered onto the motherboards. So the vast majority of computer owners, don't understand why their DNx files don't playback fine. So they simply don't play them back. You are 100% accurate that DNx will perform better on your windows 10 machine. The problem is, the rest of the computers in the world with $19 graphics cards, will need to understand that they need upgrades. Easy for a computer person to understand, but not easy for a consumer, someone who can barely keep a portable phone working, let alone a complex editing environment.

Well, name another camera that shoots Cinema DNG Raw and/or Pro Res HQ that records 60fps, which isn't gobs of money. There aren't any... and there aren't any for a reason. Pro Res is very difficult to encode for smaller/lower end processors. Blackmagic couldn't afford to source an A7 for instance, it's too expensive. They put all their money into the packaging, imager and software. Blackmagic struggled to get 30p out of the pocket camera, I use to drop frames constantly until they came out with a software patch. The URSA has a much faster processor, it finally has decent slow mo capabilities as a consequence, but in a much bigger package. The reason why the MPEG cameras can record slow-mo is because the processing is such low bitrate, the lighter weight processors don't have any issues. It wasn't a licensing problem that prevented them from having Pro Res, it's simply the processor. This is why the FS7 requires a different piece of hardware to record pro res, rather then just a simple software patch like the F5.

I second David's theory. A lot of my friends who use anamorphic on digital, are using it for the lens flare and other optical artifacts. One of my friends uses anamorphic's exclusively and his stuff is really pretty. If I had my druthers, I would use the Hawk 1.3x anamorphic's on a digital feature without question. The idea of matting down the top and the bottom to get 2.35:1, doesn't really interest me as much. Even though for that aspect ratio, the digital projector will be cropping the top and bottom.

Well it all comes down to the fact Pro Res is native to mac's AND quicktime on every single operating system dating back more than 10 years. So no special 3rd party drivers/plugin's necessary to work with Pro Res on a mac. DNx by contrast doesn't work at all on a mac without special drivers. In fact, DNx codec wrapped in MXF is one of the most incompatible professional formats for a mac. It requires different driver combo's to work and SOME editing software is very slow when using because the drivers translate the codec for quicktime. This is so every application on the mac (including finder level) can use the DNx codec, which is nice, but slow. On windows, you still need those drivers, but you can't just hit the spacebar and preview the DNx files, like you can on mac. You need to open them up in a program to watch them. The ability to quick preview anything that works with the quicktime engine, is so nice. I'm not sure if Windows has fixed that issue with 10 service packs, but on the few windows 10 Avid bay's I've installed, the DNx files were not playable by the operating system without an application to view them. So if all you do is use specialized programs all day long, DNx works fine on both mac and windows. The problem is, a lot of an editors time is spent organizing and watching files at the file level. Without the computers ability to natively playback files at that level, it makes organizing very challenging and a real pain in the ass. This is why handing DNx files to random clients to work with, isn't such a smart idea. In most cases, non-Avid clients will never have seen an MXF wrapped DNx file in their entire life. They aren't going to visit Avid's website to download a driver because most industry clients who use business computers, don't have the ability to install new software. This is very common place in the film/broadcast industry. At the same time, Pro Res has been around for quite a while, so most clients already have the driver on their machine and most IT departments, install quicktime as a default. I send pro res files to random people on mac's and windows machines on a regular basis and rarely have a problem. Sure, you get the occasional non-industry client who can't play it back, but if you install iTunes, you have quicktime and the ability to playback pro res. The other problem is laptops. The vast majority of people in the film/broadcast industry, use laptops. Not for just for editing on the go, but also for viewing clips their editors send them. In this case, they can't upgrade the graphics card so it's powerful enough to handle the very GPU intensive DNx codec. Where Pro Res works great, even on 10 year old mac laptops, because it's designed to work properly on multithreaded 64 bit systems. At the same time, the vast majority of computer owners, don't even know what a GPU is. Educating all of them is impossible, most of them just buy a new computer when it gets slow, instead of upgrading at the component level. So you can say; buy a better GPU all you want. The reality is, very few of them will. On the Mac side of things, nobody does. The vast majority of computers I work with, have stock graphics cards. This is because the clients buy 10 at a time and they don't spurge for the higher end computers. DNx is great for people who understand computers, and have put in the time and effort to make those computers work well. For everyone else, Pro Res is a far better format, not just because it's native to mac's (most of the post production industry is mac) but also because it's CPU based, which means you don't need to go out and find a special graphics card to make it work. This is especially a problem with laptops which have junky Intel built-in graphics.

This is how I'd rate them. Alexa SXT Epic Dragon Red One MX F55 F5 C500 Ursa Mini 4.6k FS7 A7SMKII GH4 Blackmagic 2.5k The Alexa is by far the best over-all camera on that list. Some may argue the newer Red Weapon-X is on par, but the Epic is not. The Red One MX is very similar to the Epic in quality, even though it's bigger. The F5 and F55 are great cameras, but not QUITE up to par in quality to the Alexa and Red. Those cameras aren't really going after that market anyway, sony makes other cameras for the purely "cinema" market. If you put the F5/F55 footage next to the Alexa and/or RED, even with a good colorist, the difference is clear. Not as much with the F65, which competes directly with the Alexa. I'd put the C500, Ursa Mini 4.6k and FS7 very close to each other. They all have strengths and weaknesses, but final output quality is very similar. The FS7 is more ENG (electronic news gathering) style, the C500 is a hybrid with the functions of an ENG camera, but in a much smaller form factor. The Ursa Mini is more of a cinema camera with a sprinkling of ENG features. I really like the C500's imager, it's a gorgeous kit, but the Canon electronics let it down I feel. They haven't quite nailed getting the imager quality onto the screen like the other manufacturers have. The C500 is by far the best attempt, but it's not there yet. I'd put the GH4 and A7SMKII as an identical finish, they are the competition to one another and they are the most similar looking cameras after coloring. The A7SMKII has a few features like the mechanical stabilization and ultra low-light capabilities which make it stand out. However, the A7SMKII also has some issues, one of which is the imager being so sensitive, it's hard to get decent quality high dynamic range images out of it, when you're in direct sunlight. It's as if the designers never took into account natural light when designing, which is very strange. I've worked with both cameras and colored many shots with them, I've found them both to have similar highlight clipping issues on bright patches and look more like "video" then cinematic. Of course, both suffer from the very restrictive, low quality internal recording format, which is a real shame. The expense, weight and size of external recorders to get better quality, makes the fundamental purpose of buying a small camera, negated. The Blackmagic 2.5k is a great looking camera, but it stands alone for many reasons. Partially due to the physical issues; internal battery, big LCD display in the back which is worthless, odd size which makes it hard to hand hold, big/expensive SSD as the only recording device, 1/4" audio which is annoying to adapt. Nobody has any idea what Blackmagic was thinking when they designed this camera, it's almost a joke of an idea, but they sold like hotcakes and still do today believe it or not. The imager looks outstanding for the price bracket and it shoots real 2k 12 bit RAW and Pro Res HQ, which is awesome. Missing from this list is the Blackmagic Pocket camera, which I would honestly put above the 2.5k because it has so many positives in comparison. From the ability to run lower-priced, but higher quality S16 lenses, to the form factor and of course, the fact most of the mistakes made in the 2.5k design are missing in the Pocket. Having spent quite a bit of time with the 2.5k, 4k and pocket camera, I can attest to how much I really love the pocket in comparison, it's a world of difference in my eyes. Not something you'd use to make a feature film with, but absolutely something I'd use on the go.

DNx in itself is a great codec actually, I've been told it's JPEG2000 based which means it requires specialized hardware to playback. This is the reason why Avid has always been a hardware based editor. Today however, with super fast GPU's available, it's less of a problem. The only real issue is with people who don't have fast GPU's. The GUI tends to gobble up all the system resources and the first thing to stop working is the DNx playback engine. On systems with fast GPU's, this isn't an issue and DNxHR is really a great codec for those people. One small side note, it does require 3rd party plugins to work in the OS properly. Very much unlike DNx, Pro Res is a CPU based codec. The whole reason it works well is because it's multithreaded. This splits the tasks against multiple threads and cores within each of the processors. This requires a 64 bit operating system and multiple cores, which is actually easier to deal with then fast graphics cards, which eat up power. Apple wanted Pro Res to be workable on all their computers, including laptops, without the necessity of having a super fast GPU. Bit rate vs bit rate, Pro Res and DNxHR are identical quality wise. The only difference is how they used by the system. From my experience, DNx works a lot better on windows computers then Pro Res. It's visa versa on Mac's, where most people prefer Pro Res because it's 100% native without 3rd party plugin's like DNx has. Another kinda important side note is that, I don't believe you can render effects to DNx with any non-avid editor. That's one of the limitations that Avid put on licensing DNx. This means, when you render effects on your sequence, you are most likely going to working with a different codec. This isn't an issue in Avid, where DNx native, but it's something to think about. Obviously DaVinci only renders on the fly, so there is no reason for an intermediary codec like other editors. I'm glad Pro Res doesn't work good on Windows, it separates the platforms even better. Keep the professionals using the Mac OS.

Right, so when you shoot 2x anamorphic and project it, you are getting 2.39:1. I guess Stewart's point is that with a digital imager the aspect ratio would be 2.66:1.

If you shoot academy and make a print, you aren't cropping to get 2.39:1.?

Well, the agency I worked for owned the rights, since it was all commercial work. So I couldn't just go in there and get a copy of my stuff, it really sucked. The one time I did, they handed me a 3/4" tape with burned in timecode. I'm sure somewhere in a box, in someone's attic, that tape still exists, but I doubt it works.

It's really down to the imager's ability to translate photons of light into data and how that data is then translated into a visual image. Most of the still cameras like the Lumix, focus on creating still images, rather then video. If you were to take a still frame from the video and compare it to a still frame shot with the camera, the difference is night and day. The video side of the DSLR's has always been very weak, the GH4 and A7SMKII being slight exceptions. In my opinion, 4k isn't as important as the imagers ability.

I don't have anything really good online, I'm mostly a for-hire filmmaker. So I can't post anything and a lot of times, I never get a copy of my work, which sucks. Almost all of my decent film stuff was lost due to the company who financed it, filing bankruptcy and somehow mysteriously loosing all the masters. It's an unfortunate side effect of the industry we live in. But if you're bored, you can check out my company page: http://tpproductionfilms.com

Because 2x anamorphic was made for the format from the ground up. It's 2.35:1 I believe. Nope, it squeezes the information onto the frame. You need to google search "anamorphic lenses" there are great reads.

35mm and digital S35 imager cameras are 4x3 or 1.33:1 aspect ratio. So with a 2x squeeze, the imager captures twice the width. With a 1.33:1 aspect ratio frame size, you're talking about 2.39:1 aspect ratio. With 16mm and HD digital cameras which are 16:9 or 1.75:1 aspect ratio (Super 16 is 1.67:1), 2x lenses would create a MUCH WIDER image then 2.39:1, so that would mean much more cropping on the sides. To remedy this issue, 1.3x anamorphic lenses were developed. These lenses work perfectly on that size imager, to deliver an almost perfect 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Your budget would also include production right? 2 perf 35mm and S16mm are more then HALF the price then 4 perf anamorphic just for production. In post, you have less film to deal with, less money involved as well, so it's cheaper both in production and post. I've done MANY S16 spherical budgets with a 10:1 ratio, they all come out the same, around $40k for everything from stock, processing and transfer. 2 perf 35mm is $50k. 3 perf 35mm is 70k. 4 perf is 90k. Then anything you shoot anamorphic, it's more money due to the lens expense. Spherical is A LOT cheaper!

For 2.39:1 widescreen: There is no waste/loss when shooting 4 perf anamorphic. There is is only a tiny bit of waste/loss shooting 3 perf 1.3x anamorphic. (2.66:1 - 2.39:1 crop) There is no waste/loss when shooting spherical 2 perf. There is no waste/loss when shooting S16 1.3x anamorphic. The only loss would be "CROPPING" any given format.

That's right and the 1.3's don't have that problem, especially the Hawks. I'm no expert, I've just used both and that's what I've experienced. I absolutely love the 1.3x Hawks, but they're $5000/day to rent! OUCH!

Ohh Lumix G7, sorry I thought that was the computer name or something. I didn't recognize it as a Panasonic still camera. Unfortunately with the current laptop specs, I think it will be pretty impossible to edit 4k. You really need a super fast processor and decent graphics board. Pentium processors have been replaced by the Intel core 2 and i3/i5/i7 over the last 6 years or so. Pentium's can't deal with multi-threaded tasks very much and as a consequence, they can't deal with a lot of the CPU based playback and rendering. Another issue is how fast your storage is. Does the computer have USB3 and are your drives USB3 compatible?

Sorry, I haven't used the BRAND NEW 2X anamorphic's. I just know from my experience with older 2x anamorphic's, the lenses were very soft wide open, where the older 1.3x one's weren't. I like running stuff all the way open and to me that was a huge pro with the 1.3x anamorphic's.

Sure, but you can't use 2x anamorphic's wide open, they're very/super soft. The 1.3x Hawks can be run wide open no problem.

Today we don't use the DI process because nobody prints back to film. Films are scanned to digital and from that point on, they are digital. Blow-up's are the increasing of an image to fill a greater resolution. With film, 35mm would be blowed up to lets say IMAX 15/70 or standard 5/70. But with digital, there are only TWO theatrical resolutions; 2k and 4k. Since almost all movies are shot and/or scanned at 4k and presented in the same or less resolution, the whole verbiage of blow-up doesn't matter anymore. Even IMAX films today presented at science museums are generally shot in 4k digital and scanned back to film in 4k. So you aren't "blowing" up anything, you're simply taking 4k and scanning it to film. For wide-screen (2.39:1) movies on film, there are five ways to go; S16 with 1.3x anamorphic lenses, 2 perf (2.39:1 with spherical lenses), 3 perf with spherical and cropped OR 1.3x anamorphic lenses (2.66:1 and you crop the sides) and 4 perf with 2x anamorphic lenses to get 2.40:1. 2 perf is a great format if you use the finer grain stocks, it looks pretty good. 3 perf anamorphic (1.3x) has less distortion then 4 perf (2x) and the lenses CAN BE faster. 4 perf anamorphic (2x) yields the highest resolution, but it also uses the most film AND has slower/more distorting lenses. With digital, you can use the same process. Either crop the imager top and bottom with spherical lenses (2 perf). You can use 1.3x anamorphic lenses on digital cameras with a native 1.75:1 aspect ratio. Or you can use 2x anamorphic lenses with square 1.33:1 imagers. The same issues with glass remain however, 1.3x will be a cleaner/faster lens then a 2x. If I was to shoot a film today that was going to be digital distribution only, I would absolutely contemplate S16 1.3x anamorphic and 3 perf and 2 perf 35mm with no anamorphic, just crop. I'd focus on finer grain stocks and lighting properly to compensate. For anything that MAY go to film print, it's a no brainer to shoot 4 perf 2x anamorphic. Yes, you can do a 1:1 (1.67:1) blow up from S16 to 35mm with a slight matte. It's kind of expensive, looks great, but doesn't get you the 2.39:1 aspect ratio. The problem is, 4 perf 35mm with anamorphic is very expensive. This is why a lot of people shoot 3 and 2 perf with a crop, it's SOOOO much cheaper. Nobody is going to give you anamorphic lenses for free, but 16mm and 35mm bodies can be found pretty easily for great deals. If you do the math, you'll find S16 and 2 perf 35mm with a digital finish, to be very similar in cost to Alexa 4k from the point of view of camera rental, extra hardware needed for set, the coloring process and long-term storage. Obviously if you shoot with a friends camera for free and somehow have a cheap/free colorist, it doesn't matter. But if you want good color, if you want the very best camera's, digital is nearly the same price of film. Anamorphic lens rental will triple the lens rental budget and 4 perf is double the pricing from purchasing stock through finishing. So when you sit down to do the math, to make a movie on motion picture film and do a digital only finish, 4 perf kinda goes out the window budget wise. If you do a photochemical finish only, it's BETTER... but still nowhere near the price of S16 and 2 perf 35mm with digital finish.

There are two RED Rocket cards. The standard Red Rocket and the Red Rocket X. The standard Red Rocket is for the Mysterium imager. The Rocket X is for Dragon. The Red Rocket cards are only compatible with certain software, so it won't magically make the files playback smoothly at the finder level or in your editing software. It would be used to transcode your material in DaVinci and/or Red Cine X to Pro Res for editing. It's great however for finishing in DaVinci, makes a huge difference. Standard Rocket cards are $150 - $200 on ebay. Red Rocket X cards are $3000 - $5000 on ebay. I have two Red Rocket cards in my bay right now and they work great with Red footage. Prior I was encoding around 9 - 12 FPS. With the Rocket, my speed is more than real-time, around 30fps. That includes scaling to 1080p from 4k and doing mattes per shot. If all you're doing is scaling and you have fast drives, it should be even faster. Pro Res is a very CPU intensive codec, so if you're converting to Pro Res you need power. If you have a PC, you're kinda screwed because Pro Res on PC's is 32bit vs 64bit on Mac's. Plus, there are lots of driver issues with RED material on PC's which drag the whole process down. The GTX680 Classified I have does help with the scaling, I noticed a marketable bump in performance with that card, plus it helps with the payback of material that has effects. It also helps with the Red decoding. In fact, with the GTX680 alone, RED can be played back at half res no problem. It's only when you start playing back in 4k that things go a bit haywire and that Rocket card is so important. Most of the DIT's I know run higher end Mac Pro systems and they don't have any problems using RED material of any kind without a rocket card. The newer double AMD D700 6GB graphics cards in the Mac Pro's, are fast enough to playback Red without any special hardware/software. It's native all the way around, which is quite impressive. My friends can encode RED material at 48 - 60fps! OUCH!!!! But it's very powerful processor wise as well.

http://filmemporium.com is a broker who deals specifically with movie production insurance. They are widely used in the world of movie production.

What's your camera? What's your storage?

The vast majority of people, aren't going to transcode their media to a lower resolution (duplicating media and storage) in order to edit and then go back to the original media, conform and export. The vast majority of people are going to open up a simple editing tool, drag their 4k footage into it, edit their piece and export. Heck, without using powerful tools like DaVinci and Premiere, you can't even do the down-res, edit and conform workflow. There is absolutely no magic, I know many PC/Windows guys running DaVinci in 4k, real time with no problems. In fact, right before I started this feature I'm working on, I installed a few windows workstations with Premiere and they were working flawlessly with RED/Arri Raw 4k media. Storage is a big deal, my raid's throughput is close to 500MBps, which is kinda slow for 4k, but most of the storage solutions I work with are well over 800MBps. Storage throughput is critical for working with real codecs. Hitfilm probably does cached/proxy playback like Final Cut X does. It probably caches renders behind the scenes. Final Cut X is amazing with .h264 files, it works like a dream, totally flawless at full res. Ohh I work with .h264/.h265 media every day. It's part of living in our modern world. Most of the time, I'll transcode consumer formats into something more workable by normal editing programs. If I need to turn something out fast, I will use FCPX, edit in real time and export. I've done quite a few FCPX 4k shorts for clients, most of it GoPro or drone origination. I know how to work on a budget, my desktop is from 08, my laptop is from 09. I know how to get the most out of computers, though I will agree that most of my work is on Mac's. I do a considerable amount of PC work as well, computer freelancing for the film industry is partially how I pay the bills. I just promote what actually physically works and has been tested for the application (in this case 4k media for youtube). I have posted hundreds of youtube videos on various channels and have been encoding specifically for youtube delivery for close to a decade. I don't use Premiere on my edit bay, mainly because I work on bigger, more commercial shows and I don't think Premiere is up to the challenge yet. I've been trained by Adobe and have installed the suite on dozens of computers. I've also trained people to use it, so I'm well verse in the newest versions, even though I don't use it at home on my own personal bay. Anyway, we're just talking, the OP is busy and doesn't have the specs for his computer yet.