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Stuart Brereton

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Everything posted by Stuart Brereton

  1. Raymond, looking at the film shot at 3:25, and the equivalent Alexa shot at 3:04, I'd say that the Alexa has the flat look of highlights that have clipped and been brought down to compensate. There's a lack of detail in there, and the slightly gray look that highlights take on when they been pulled back too far. It would have been useful to see the LogC gamma version of this shot to see if it was clipped there too. It's common knowledge that digital cameras clip after peak white, rather than rolling off smoothly as film does. Not all digital cameras are created equal though, and cameras like the GH5 (which prompted this thread) and Arri Alexa have different capabilities. The short answer to your question is that you need to expose for your highlights. Shoot with LOG gamma. Make sure nothing is clipping. If that means your shadows go too dark, add fill. If you can't add fill, then at least you know you have the ability to lift your shadows in post to a far greater degree than you would with film.
  2. What you can do in Baselight and what you can do in a LUT are not the same thing.
  3. And over 100 years of film, and it still can’t capture shadow detail properly. You have a huge double standard here.
  4. The point of his work was to provide himself with a workflow that he felt recreated the look of film. As he has used it professionally on films like Knives Out, I guess he feels he succeeded. Why should the fact that it’s a proprietary process mean that it doesn’t count?
  5. Clipped highlights with digital is not news either, but you saw fit to start a thread about it. You’ve just illustrated my point for me; film’s shortcomings are ignored, while digital is constantly complained about in order to make unfavorable comparisons.
  6. Digital technology is already capable of accurately reproducing film color spaces; if it wasn’t, film scanners would be useless. Steve Yedlin, ASC (among others) has devised and demonstrated his approach for transforming digital primaries to match film. He has created gamma tables to match film. He has written his own randomized adaptive grain algorithms. His work is extremely impressive. No, what they are saying is that they refuse to believe that it’s possible, that you will not convince them, that no matter how mathematically perfect the emulation is, they will somehow still be able to tell the difference.
  7. If you'd stated all of that in your original post, instead of vaguely mentioning "a distance", it might have made more sense.
  8. It’s a common complaint, that digital doesn’t handle highlights like film does, and no matter how much it improves, it never seems to be enough for some people. It’s funny that we never hear complaints about the problems that film has with under exposure detail. No one is berating Kodak for not having fixed this issue. It’s just accepted. In fact, when improvements are made to film stock, it’s usually decried by the purists. The problem with these discussions is that they are generally bad faith arguments on the part of the people starting them, and it’s always the film fans who start them. There are a substantial number of zealots within that group who will never be convinced, for whom no improvement to digital will ever be sufficient. For them, film has taken on the status of a holy grail, an untouchably high standard that can never be equaled. It’s a fantasy that’s sustained by the fact that most of them never actually shoot any.
  9. If they do, it's marginal. If you look at the word Canon in the pictures, you can see that it is very slightly less blurred in the second one, which was taken without the diopter. It's such a slight difference that it's hardly noticeable.
  10. I just wonder how useful it is to post something that unknown other people told you, saying that it is possible to "somewhat guesstimate" a bounce level without specifying how far away from the bounce your subject is. Other people who are looking for information might read this and not knowing any better, spread this misinformation even further.
  11. This is a reasonable explanation, although I'm not sure how much of a net gain in sharpness there would be after adding the diopter. Also, a lot of lens designs (even older ones) incorporate floating elements to improve close focus, so there may not be much to be gained from this approach at all.
  12. It's not accurate at any distance, except the precise one that yields this result.
  13. This is an interesting question. I just had a quick play around with an old Sigma Achromatic close up diopter. I have no idea of its power. It was bargain bin find some years ago. I set up a little still life, and took two pics. First was with the lens (50mm f1.4) focused at infinity, with the achromat, which brought the focus to 2' 6". Second frame was without the achromat and focused at 2' 6". There was tiny shift in image magnification between the two, with the diopter shot being slightly larger in frame. DoF appeared very slightly shallower on the diopter shot.There was a marginal difference in sharpness, but that was more than likely down to focusing error on my part. The differences were small enough to make no difference in my opinion, but of course, others might say otherwise. As to why your DP was doing it, there may be a good reason, or it could just be down to a personal shooting quirk.
  14. It's irritating because it's been essentially the same argument over and over since at least 2008. Nothing new is ever said. No-one ever changes their mind. A complete waste of bandwidth. At least in 2008 there were legitimate comments to be made about the quality of HD-Cam, or the RED One sensor. Here in 2021, people are reduced to arguing about the proper reproduction of car tail lights. It's disappointing to see just how many people are still obsessed with format after all this time.
  15. They have. It’s called exposing for highlights. Both film and digital work best within a certain dynamic range. Often this means that a shot must be lit properly in order to look the way we want it to. Too many people assume that because digital cameras have high iso capability, they don’t need lighting. So they shoot scenes in ways that they would never dream of with film, and then complain that digital doesn’t look as good. The idea that a poorly lit and exposed shot will somehow look great just because it’s shot on film can be debunked by just a few minutes of looking at some of the awful film footage available for all to see on YouTube. A few years back, there was a semi serious suggestion on this site that we should have an unofficial ban on Film vs Digital discussions. The general feeling was that they contribute absolutely nothing worthwhile and just start pointless arguments. It was true then, it’s even more true now.
  16. As David says, 3 perf s35 is the most common format to crop. It uses less stock than cropping 4 perf, and offers flexibility to reframe, which 2 perf does not.
  17. Is it time for another film vs digital debate? Wow, they come around so quickly, don't they? Karim, setting aside the clickbait title of the thread, and the fact that your complaint about barrel distortion has nothing to do with the format the clip was shot on, you're talking about an old and well-known issue with digital cameras. You're using a fairly mediocre looking clip to illustrate this argument, and one where we have no idea what camera system was used. Both shots in that video show ugly clipping of an overexposed rear light, which could easily be mitigated by stopping down the aperture and then raising the ambient light levels of the shot to compensate. Controlling contrast ratios is something we do all the time with both film and video. Ugly artifacts from the extremes of exposure are not confined to digital video, as anyone who has ever tried to lift up a heavily underexposed shadow area on film will tell you. Both film and digital have their achilles heels, and constantly comparing them, then complaining that X is not Y really serves no purpose.
  18. Simply, yes. Some cinematographers prefer to create 2.35:1 by using spherical lenses and cropping. Like Lubezki, Roger Deakins does this because he prefers the look of Master Primes. Other cinematographers have done it because they dislike anamorphic lenses. David Watkin once described them as an "optical nightmare". Sometimes there are other practical considerations, like close focus or weight, that preclude using anamorphic lenses.
  19. Magic Cloth is great for big, multi lamp rigs like overhead soft boxes, but I think it’s overkill for things like Chimeras and Octos. It cuts an awful lot of light, and it’s not actually any softer than grid cloth.
  20. This is not always true. Sony cameras like the the F55, f5, and FS7 have native 17:9 sensors.
  21. Yeah, that is what I'm saying. The vimeo clip doesn't say what format was originally shot. The RED material was obviously some flavor of RED Raw, but there's no mention which 709 LUT was used. The BM footage might have been BRAW, or could have been ProRes, again no mention of what LUT was used. Not all LUTs are created equal, and all this video really shows is that some LUTs work better with some cameras than others. I don't have a lot of experience with BM cameras, but I do remember thinking that their own 709 LUT wasn't that great. With regards to using polarizers, as Satsuki has already pointed out, they only work at certain angles, which might be fine for a still frame, but as soon as the actor moves, the highlight will return.
  22. It might be nothing more complicated than what LUT was used for the transform from Log to Rec709. I’ve seen Alexa footage with atrocious highlights because of a poorly executed transform.
  23. And as TV manufacturers have conflated 4K & UHD, there are many, many producers who don't know the difference.
  24. Good! The earliest Amazon can deliver a sheet of this is sometime in March ?
  25. Yet the filter he's holding in the picture on his website appears to have diffracted light across the whole surface.
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