Tyler Purcell

The Alexa is a powerhouse because it fits right into a similar workflow as film and it's a well made, known-brand camera. The technical features are only icing on the cake as most of the other options don't have nearly the reputation as Arri. Let's face it, Arri did almost everything correct on the Alexa, even the pricing isn't too ridiculous for the image quality. But to my original point, which was interpreted differently then my initial meaning… Unlike the film days, each digital camera has it's own unique look, where the film camera body played no role in the quality of the final image. The camera body is the expensive part because it's not a mass-produced machine, it's made for a specific, limited production use. But now, if you don't like the look of a certain camera, you're stuck with changing cameras OR fixing it in post production.

And it will do well in the box office like Skyfall did. I rather enjoy stupid action films and have liked Daniel Craig's bond films very much so.

With current digital projection technology, nothing stops you from doing what I do… 14 feet wide screen… Imax BluRay of Interstellar… and a bitchin' stereo. Sounded better and looked better then standard digital projection in a cineplex.

Filmmakers are finding it more and more difficult to raise money for narrative feature films. The whole "mid budget" 10 - 20M projects, don't exist anymore. So even if you've got a great idea for a mid-budget film, it's nearly impossible to raise the money. Everyone is after the 60M + or 2M and under. This is why many top directors have been so focused on working in television. They have money and because most series these days are 10 - 13 episodes, it's not that difficult to shoot. Work for half the year and the other half hang out and prep for next season. Sounds like a pretty good, consistent job to me.

Adrian, you make me laugh! :D

I don't think compressor can encode 4K media, it's pretty much a 1920x1080 or lower program. Just make sure your settings are 100% in the output. You can try cinema tools if you have an older version of FCP. However, the flags must be perfect for it to work. Also, if the flags are set right, your NLE should be able to translate on the fly. However, I have no idea if the Ninja writes proper flags.

Sure, you've got different ASA's, different resolution selections, different color balance, these are all things in the the past we'd have to change stocks to achieve. Sure, the sensor delivers a particular image, but so do ALL 35mm Kodak Vision 3 negative stocks. So the camera sensor will be like a brand and type of stock (Kodak vision 3 for instance) and the type of stock is adjusted within the camera. Lucky for me, I kinda like Vision 3. LOL :)

WOW, Blockbuster video? I totally forgot they existed! It's been almost two decades since I last used them. I never liked VHS, the format in my eyes was too inferior to bother with. So I always rented laserdiscs, which kept me away from places like blockbuster. If memory serves me, the problem with Blockbuster was the lack of new title availability. The nice thing about the laserdisc store was; new releases were always available. If you showed up and they didn't have a copy for rent, they'd just open a new one and hand it to you. Sure, it was $5 bux a rental or something like that, but getting that kind of quality at home was unheard of in the VHS days. When everything moved to DVD, the laserdisc stores tried to transition, but Netflix won out in the end because they offered a much better deal. RedBox has filled in where Blockbuster left off. Sure it's only a small collection of titles, but they always seem to have copies and instead of wading through all the old movies, you only have access to the new stuff. Between RexBox and Netflix dvd rental, I'd say that market is still going, even though most people have moved away from rentals and into streaming. There are also many family owned video rental stores still around, I know one of my laserdisc stores is still in business, though they deal mostly in porno today, which is too bad. I do miss going to the laserdisc store, not knowing what new releases would be there. Getting all excited about a certain title and walking home with a decent sized physical asset in a pizza box. I bought many movies instead of renting because I wanted them in my collection. Today, everything is available at any time online, so there is no need to even have a collection. In my eyes, that's the sad part because it makes movies have zero value. If you don't go to the cinema, if all you do is sit at home and click on a little button that says the movie title and watch it, you haven't put any value on that product. Sure you may enjoy it, but it won't stick around with you, it will fade away quick and you'll forget all about it when you watch whatever comes next. Movies have gone from a special art form, to nothing more then a commodity.

Generally the "cinema" mode will flatten out the image (S-Log), so in post production it's much easier to manipulate. This way, you can apply a canon S300 LUT to the image in DaVinci Resolve and retain some of the dynamic range. The majority of people shoot in this fashion as manipulation of Rec709 files, is a lot more challenging and especially with the canon camera's, which are overly saturated and that can lead to color noise due to the 8 bit processing. The nice thing about Resolve is that it's free… AND you can batch files. This means, you can simply drag your raw camera files into the system, apply a LUT to all the shots and export them to whatever format you want. DaVinci's engine is very fast/powerful and it works wonders for finishing when your done with the show and wish to go back to the S-Log raw camera files for final color. However, if you're doing shoots that don't require much color correction, there are many standard Rec709 modes built into the camera, which will give you the proper image on the file output.

Depends on what your camera outputs. If your camera outputs REC709, then simply set it to native. If it outputs raw/S-Log, then set it to REC709. I personally like Rec709 with 70 zebra's, that's how I normally setup my monitoring device.

Honestly, I don't know how much of a role Alan Horn has played. It's a good question, but studios' have been using those techniques for decades. I don't think the blockbusters have gone anywhere. In fact, I'd say in today's day in age there are two kinds of movies… The blockbuster and the Indy, that's it. With the studio's churning out "market friendly" safe pieces of entertainment on subjects every inner child want's to see, (blow poop up) the studios are pulling in hefty numbers on those few films. Even though the industry at a whole has worse ticket sales every year, those few blockbusters are what's holding the industry a float every season. Raising ticket prices for premium this and that, will most likely be the demise of smaller standard theaters. Once that happens, all we'll be able to see on the big screen ARE blockbusters. I think in this transition period, there is a lot of good crowd funding can accomplish. However, people are making films for less and less money. There is a new paradigm being generated through these forms of funding. As a consequence, people are simply expecting films to be made for A LOT less money. This means the workers on those films are getting paid less. This new paradigm is turning the film industry on it's head because harder now to make money then ever before. Every year, new talent hits the street, competing for the same jobs. However, that new talent sucks up all the non-paying (back-end money) or low-paying work, which is where everyone is going these days. So crowd funding hasn't really solved a problem, it's just forced everyone to make movies for less money and it's told the real money people; hey… we can make movies for less! Which is unfortunately, simply not true. To make a good product, still costs a lot of money no matter what. Internet distribution is the future. The whole concept of paying monthly fee and getting any content you want for that fee, is where we're headed. With the advent of bigger screens at home, with the advent of higher internet speeds and smaller more powerful computers, the streaming age is upon us. It will take someone like Apple to finally figure out the mess we're currently in, because there is no one solution today. I personally think the answer lies in cinema chain's like AMC, selling tickets to movie shows and instead of selecting a theater to see it in, you can see it at home. This will require decoding built-into your TV set, not an external box. I'd assume first run films will be at theaters only for the first two weeks, but then available online right away at home for the same price as going to the cinema. This would make the cinema's smaller, it would keep the distribution chain in tact AND most importantly, in this very busy world, it would allow substantial convince for families. I personally feel that's the only real answer because 3rd party companies like Netflix, Amazon, Apple or Hulu will never be able to provide that service. I do think cinema's will survive, but in a different way. More like they did in the 40's and 50's… single screen "event" houses, charging $25- per ticket and showing not just a single 90 minute movie, but huge multi-hour films with intermission's. Real "events" like going to the opera, produced on grand scales, on HUGE screen's that just WOW the audience. We took a HUGE step backwards when we threw away film projectors and installed digital one's. Most digital cinema's are 2k and some films are only 1920x1080. So shooting technology is far superior to anything we're seeing in the theaters today. We don't need anymore advancement in digital capture technology as we can't distribute any higher quality because the internet providers have put a strangle hold on how much bandwidth customers are capable of receiving. Heck, very few films are even finished in 4k and anyone can shoot with 4k today. So what needs to happen is a multi-billion dollar campaign to bring all theaters up to 4k and force all content makers to provide 4k OR BETTER source material. Which by the way, will never happen. The great thing about film was the gauge defined the resolution. So there were pretty much three resolutions… 16mm/35mm/65mm. Today, there are infinite resolutions and no control over any of it. So no, I don't think anything that happens in the capture world will make one iota of difference in the distribution methods. We use CMOS sensors today in most of our cinema cameras. These sensors are great because they can capture a very wide dynamic range with an excellent color profile. They aren't perfect, but they're the best technology we have today. However, everyone has their own ideas on how the sensor's data should be interpreted. This is why different cameras have totally different looks, even if most of them are using the same cheap Chinese imagers. With that being said, television shows and cinema have generally been parallel until the last 10 years or so when television has slowly switched to digital. Prior to that, a great deal of shows were shot on 35mm including multi-camera sitcoms, which always boggles my mind. Today however, we're more separate then ever because unlike the film days where people only used a few different stocks, today every digital cinema camera has it's own look. So most content has a very unique look and to further that, color correction processes have allowed major changes to look that weren't capable in the film days. So we're seeing an even larger discrepancy in look today, then during the film days.

Very shocking… just posted it on Facebook, nobody seems to know here yet. I always loved Andrew's work, he really stood out as one of my favorite DP's. Really, truly, sad. :(

In my book, the FS7 and Ursa Mini are entirely different, non-compariable cameras. The FS7 is more like an ENG camera, with ND filters built in, switches on the side to control things like gain, white balance, focus controls, etc. For documentary run and gun shooting with a zoom lens, it probably works pretty well. The down sides to the FS7 are huge however. Sony's steadfast commitment to MPEG based formats (XAVC/Long GOP) still blows my mind. These 8 bit compression algorithms should have been dead years ago after the invent of wavelet compression technologies. Sony still uses them because their editing software "Vegas", has been built around these compression standards. So you're basically buying a camera where the manufacturer has purposely limited the capability because they want you to use their software for post production. MPEG's are worthless for any other software, even FCPX has troubles working natively with these files, they're so GPU intensive, if you don't have a super fast computer, you're screwed. I understand you can spend many thousands more and get Pro Res capture, but what's the point? The Blackmagic Designs Ursa Mini is a cinema camera. Kinda like a film camera with a built-in audio recorder and adjustable film stocks. It's not designed for run and gun shooting, it's designed to make cinematic looking images. Having owned blackmagic cameras for almost 2 years now, they still blow my mind away compared to any of the direct competition, most of which I've shot with at one point or another. Plus, codec is everything in today's digital age. Blackmagic's decision to go pro res and CInema DNG Raw, were outstanding because any Open GL graphics card, can playback Pro Res natively. So that mean's PC's and Mac's editing software with quicktime, can use the codec natively, except for Sony Vegas of course. The 10 bit 422 material coming out of my cameras, goes right into Avid, FCP7 or Premiere without any transcoding necessary, literally link to source and start editing. Plus, the Ursa Mini shoots 12 bit 444 as well, something that's nearly impossible to get with the FS7 unless you've got an external recorder. So yes, the FS7 serves a different purpose entirely. I think for doc work, it probably works pretty well as having the absolute best quality, isn't necessarily the most important thing.

I mean all that article does is make me want one even worse! :)

Ohh wow, that's some old school stuff you got there! It's a whole new world today, even the final version of FCP before they went to X is version 7.0.3, which came out in 2009. You can still buy FCP7 on ebay, it's not that expensive. I'd grab a nice Mac Pro tower, they're not that expensive on ebay either. It will be a lot faster then a Mac Mini and work well for future proofing. Look for a 3,1 Mac pro 8 core 2.8ghz or better. I bought mine a few years ago for $800 bux on ebay. Then all you need is a fast boot drive, some internal storage (because it's a lot faster) and you're done. I'd upgrade to 10.8.5 operating system and leave it there. I think you'll be good with that system for many years, until the web brewers no longer support Mountain Lion, then you can migrate to the newest operating system because the Mac Pro 3,1 is 64 bit and upgradable forever pretty much. Hope that makes sense.

Ahh cool. That's the one thing I don't like about Facebook. If you miss something someone posted, it's sometimes impossible to find it. :) Someday I wanna be behind the camera… :)

Do you have any links to those pix? I've looked everywhere and google can't find them… :)

Production has been very quiet. No still's, no real reports on how things went. Even the lab's been pretty quiet.

That's awesome Phil! Welcome to Blackmagic land, where nobody seems to know anything until the product has been out for a year or more! ROFL!!!! :D

Grant said in his interview the viewfinder was "standard" connectors… whatever that means. :shrug:

Yea, I too am a bit skeptical. JJ is a one trick pony, the film is going to be a lot of "Wow that was cool", glimmer, reflections and sparkle, which is NOT what Star Wars is all about. What made the original star wars films so great is the characters, story, the sparse use of special effects, the slower pace and of course the actors themselves. In my opinion JJ ruined star trek through his obsession of "wow that's cool" moments, which maybe great for younger people who don't understand what Star Trek is all about. However those of us who experienced star trek on television and in the theaters for our entire lives, it was a huge departure and unfortunately kinda ruined the franchise. Luckily the next two Star Wars films won't be made by him. The reigns have already been handed over to younger, less experienced director, which maybe good or bad. Honestly, I'm already looking at episode 8 and 9, knowing JJ's #7 is probably going to be just like his other films. In terms of IMAX material, I've heard rumors the final 20 minutes or so is 100% Imax. The rest will be heavily processed anamorphic 35mm. It still humors me to this day that ease of workflow is more important than quality. When you've got a huge film like Star Wars, what stops you from shooting THE WHOLE THING in IMAX? It's not budget… If Christopher Nolan can shoot 90 minutes, Star Wars can certainly do the same thing.

Hey Justin, It's a huge debate and I've done a lot of research/testing because I've been hired to shoot stuff on the 7AS. The rolling shutter is the worst of all the cameras, far worse then my blackmagic pocket, which is unfortunate. The A7II doesn't appear to be any better, but even worse, it does all sorts of things to stabilize the image. I mean, that's nice and all, but I can't imagine it being good because it's doing it sensor side. So either the sensor is mounted on a magnetic plate or it's actively cropping pixels, which never works right. The A7S and A7II only shoot 60FPS @ 1080p and 120fps @ 720p. The Ursa Mini shoots 60FPS @ 4k RAW internally and shoots 150fps @ 1080p RAW internally. Plus, the A7S and A7II only shoot 8 bit 4:2:0 MPEG files, even in S-Log mode. The only way to get 4:2:2 out of it is by using an external recorder and IT'S STILL 8 BIT! So good luck color grading, you'll be missing a lot of pixels in this 12 bit world we live in today. The A7S has great low light, it's amazing, stunning, fantastic. But god help you if the camera moves, or something moves fast in front of the camera, it's just a blur. In contrast the Ursa Mini shoots 4:4:4 12 bit raw files in 4k. Same as the top cinema cameras. Sure, it won't ever have that low light capability, but buy a A7S for that one or two times you need it and shoot with a real cinema camera every other time.

Ouch!!! That's some expensive filtration! Interesting idea though, thanks for mentioning it. :)

I dropped you an e-mail :) I like to run the pocket around 45 degree shutter or LESS. Plus once I add the speed booster, I'm expecting to get at least one or two stops in return. I also run the camera at 200 ASA pretty much always, unless I have absolutely no choice and I'd rather go for higher shutter angle first, before resorting to higher ASA. The 200 just looks SOO much better in my opinion. When I get some money in May, the speed booster and a few filters are on a very, very, very short list of "must have's"

Yea, the polymer filters are HORRIBLE anyway. They really make stuff look like poop. Here is a great example… the beginning of this video is shot with 2x.9 ND's and I couldn't correct the problem.